r 



/a 



« 



SHORT HMtORY 



'Nx/: 



OF THE '^' Ae^ 

ENGLISH PEOPLE. 






/^ J. R. GREEN, M.A. 

\ EXAMINER IN THE SCHOOL OF MODERN HISTOKV, OXFORD- 

VSTITH MAPS AND TABLES. 

SEVENTEENTH TEIOUSAND. 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

1875. 

[ The R'f^ht of T'anslation and Reproduction is Restrvtd.] 






LONDON : 

R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRIN'iERS, 

BREAD STREET HILL. 



■^^'^sfe^ 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS 



OF 



ENGLISH HISTORY. 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 
449-1016. 



^36 
39 



English land in Britain. 

Kent conquered by English. 

Landing of South Saxons. 

Landing of West Saxons. 

British victory at Mount Badon. 

Ida founds Kingdom of Bernicia. 

We A ixons take OW Sarum. 

.ffithelberht, King of Kent, died 6i6. 

driven back by West Saxons. 

West Saxons march into Mid- Britain. 

conquer at Deorham. 

iEthelfrithL creates Kingdom of North- 

umbria, died 617. 
West Saxons defeated at Fethanlea. 
A tcgnstine converts Ke7tt. 
Battle of Daegsastan. 
Battle of Chester. 
Gad'Wine^ King of Northumbria, died 

633- 

overlord of Britain. 

becomes Christian. 

slain at Hatfield. 

Os-wald^ King of Northumbria, died 
642. 

defeats Welsh at Hevenfeld. 

Aida?t settles at Holy Island. 

Conversion of Wessex. 

Oswald slain at Maserfeld. 

Oswi, King of Northumbria, died 670. 

Victory at Winwoed. 

Wulfere King in Mercia. 



658 West Saxons conquer as far as the Parret. 
664 Council of Whitby 

Ccedvion at Whitby. 
668 Theodore made Archbishop of Canterbury. 
670 Egfrith, King of Northumbria, died 685. 
676 Wulfere drives West Saxons over Thames. 

681 Wilfrid converts South Saxons. 

682 Centvvine of Wessex conquers ]\Iid-Somer- 

set. 
685 Egfrith defeated and slain at Nechtans- 
mere. 

683 Ini, King of West Saxons, died 726. 
70 5 Northumbrian conquest of Strathclyde. 
714- Ini defeats Ceolred of Mercia at Wodnes- 

borough. 

716 ^thelbald^ King of Mercia, died 755. 

733 Mercian conquest of Wessex. 

752 Wessex recovers freedom in battle of Bur- 
ford. 

755 Deaths of Bceda and Boniface. 

756 Eadberht of Northumbria takes Alcluyd. 
758 Offa^ King of Mercia, died 794. 

773 subdues Kentish men at Otford. 

777 defeats West Saxons at Bensington. 

784 places Brightric on throne of Wessex. 

786 creates Archbishopric at Lichfield. 

787 First landing of Danes in England. 
794 Cenwnlf, King of Mercia, died 819. 

suppresses Archbishopric of Lichfield. 

800 Ecgberht, becomes King in Wessex 
died 836. 



)> 



XIV 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



I 



808 Charles the Great restores Eardwulf in 

Northumbria. 
813 Ecgberht subdues the West Welsh to the 

Tamar. 
822 Civil war in Mercia, 
8^3 Ecgberht defeats Mercians at Ellandune. 

Ecgberht overlord of England south of 

Thames. 

824 Revolt of East Anglia against Mercia. 

825 Defeat of Mercians by East Anglians. 

827 Mercia and Northumbria submit to Ecg- 

berht. 
Ecgberht, overlord of all English king- 
doms. 

828 invades Wales. 

833 ■■ defeats Danes at Hengestesdun. 

836 ^ffithelwulf, King of Wessex, died 858. 

849 Alfred born. 

851 Danes defeated at Aclea. 

853 -Alfred sent to Rome. 

855 ^thelwulf goes to Rome. 

858 iEtkelbaid, King of Wessex, died 860. 

860 iEthelberkt, Kmg of Wessex, died 866. 

866 iSthelredj King of Wessex, died 871. 

867 Danes conquer Northumbria. 

868 Peace of Nottingham with Danes. 

870 Danes conquer and settle in East Anglia. 

871 Danes invade Wessex. 
.ffilfred^ King of Wessex, died 901. 

874 Danes conquer Mercia. 
376 Danes settle in Northumbria. 

877 -Alfred defeats Danes at Exeter. 

878 Danes overrun Wessex. 
.Alfred victor at Edington. 
Peace of Wedmore. 

883 iElfred seads envoys to Rome and India. 
886 takes and refortifies London. 

893 Danes reappear in Thames and Kent. 

894 iElfred drives Hasting from Wessex. 



901 
912 
913 



895 Hasting invades Mercia. 

896 -Alfred drives Danes from Essex. 

897 Hasting quits England. 
JElfred creates a fleet. 
Kadward the Elder, died 925. 
Northmen settle in Normandy. 

918) ■^t^^^^sed conquers Danish Merciu. 
921 Eadward .subdues East Anglia and Essex. 

924 owned as overlord by Northumbria, 

Scots, and Str^.thclyde. 

925 iEtbelstan, diea 9^0. 
9^@ _ — drives Welsh from Exeter. 
934 invades Scotland. 

937 Victory of Brunanburh. 

940 £adxnund, died 947. 

943 Dunstan made Abbot of Glastonbury. 

945 Cumberland granted to Malcolm, King ol 

Scots. 
947 Eadred, died 955. 

954 makes Northumbria an 'Earldom. 

955 BadPi'-ig, died 957. 

956 Banishment of Dunstan. 

957 Revolt of Mercia under Eadgar. 
95 S Eadg-ar, died 975. 

961 Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury. 
975 Eadward tSie Martyr, died 975. 

979 iSEtkelred tlie Unready, died 1016. 

980 M ercia and Northumbria part from Wessex. 

987 \ 

■i Q^Q>Fulc the Black, Count of Anjou. 

994 Invasion of Swegen. 

1002 Massacre of Danes. 

1003 Swegen harries Wessex. 

1012 Murder of Archbishop ^ifeah. 

1013 All England submits to Swegen. 

1014 Flight of ^thelred to Normandy. 
1016 Eadxnund Ironside, King, and dies. 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 
1C17— 1204, 



1017 Cnnt, King, died 1035. 
1020 Godwine made Earl of Wessex. 
1027 (^Cnut goes to Rome. 

Birth of William of Normandy. 
1035 Harold and Harthacnut divide England. 
1037 Harold, King, died 1040. 
1040 Harthacnnt, King, died 1042. 
1042 Eadward the Confessor, died 1065. 

io6o} ^^^^^ M artel, Count of Anjou. 
1045 Lanfranc at Bee. 
1047 Victory of William at Val-es-dunes. 
1051 Banisliment of Godwiue. 



1052 William of Normandy visits England. 
Return and death of Godwine. 

1053 Harold made Earl of West-Saxons 

1054 William's victory at Mortemer. 

1055 Harold's first campaign in Wales. 

1060 ) -^o^"^^^ conquest of southern Italy 
1058 William's victory at the Dive. 
1060 Normans invade Sicily. 
1063 Harold conqi^ers Wales. 
1066 Harold, King. 

conquers at Stamford Bridge. 

defeated at Senlac or Hastings. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



1066 

1068) 

1071 i 

1070 

1075 

1081 

1085 

1086 

1087 

1093 

1094 

1096 

1097 

1098 

llOO 

llOl 
1106 

1109\ 

1129/ 

1109 

1111 

1113 

1114 

1118 

1120 

1122 

1124 

1127 

1128 

1134 

1135 

1137 



William of Normandy, King, died 1087. 
■ Norman Conquest of England. 
Reorganization of the Church. 
Rising of Roger Fitz-Osbern. 
William invades Wales. 
Failure of Danish invasion. 
Completion of Domesday Book. 
William the Red, died iioo. 
Anselm, Archbishop. 
Revolt of Wales against the Norman 

Marchers. 
Revolt of Robert de Mowbray. 
Normandy left in pledge to William. 
William invades Wales. 
Anselm leaves England. 
War with France. 
Henry tlie First, died 1135. 
Henry's Charter. 

William of Normandy invades England. 
Settlement of question of investitures. 
English Conquest of Normandy. 
Fulc of Jerusalem, Count of Anjou. 

War with France. 

War with Anjou. 

Peace of Gisors. 

Marriage of Matilda with enry V. 

Revolt of Norman baronage. 

Wreck of White Ship. 

Henry's campaign in Wales. 

France and Anjou support William Clito. 

Matilda married to Geoffry of Anjou. 

Death of the Clito in Flanders. 

Revolt of Wales. 

Steplien of Blois, died 1154. 

Normandy repulses the Angevins. 



1137 
1138 
1139 
1141 
1147 
1148 

1151 
1152 
1153 
1154 
1160 

1162 
1164 

1166 
1169 
1170 

1174 
1176 
1178 
1181 
1189 

11901 

II94J 

1194) 

1196/ 

1195 1 

1246J 

1197 

1199 

1200 

1203 
1204 



Revolt of Earl Robert. 

Battle of the Standard. 

Seizure of the Bishops. 

Battle of Lincoln. 

Matilda withdraws to Normandy. 

Henry of Anjou in England. 

Archbishop Theobald driven into exile. 

Henry becomes Duke of Normandy. 

Henrj^ marries Eleanor of Guienne. 

Henry in England. Treaty of Wallingford. 

Henry the Second, died 1189. 

Expedition against Toulouse. 

The Great Scutage. 

Thomas made Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Constitutions of Clarendon. 

Flight of Archbishop Thomas. 

Assize of Clarendon. 

Strongbow's invasion of Ireland. 

Death of Archbishop Thomas. 

Inquest of Sheriffs. 

Rebellion of Henry's sons. 

Assize of Northampton. 

Reorganization of Curia Regis. 

Assize of Arms. 

Revolt of Richard. 

Richard the First, died 1199. 

Richard's Crusade. 

War with Philip Augustus. 

Llewellyn Ap-Jorwerth in North Wales. 

Richard builds Chateau Gaillard. 
John, dies 1216. 

recovers Anjou and Maine. 

Lay avion ivrites the Brut, 

Murder of Arthur. 

French conquest of Anjou and Normandy. 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 
1204— 1295. 



120 5 Barons refuse to fight for recovery of 
Normandy. 

1208 Innocent III. puts England under Inter- 
dict. 

1211 Jbhn reduces Llewellyn-ap-Jorwerth to 

submission. 

1212 John divides Irish Pale into counties. 

1213 John becomes the Pope's vassal. 

1214 Battle of Bouvines. 
Birth of Roger Bacon. 

1215 The Great Charter. 

1216 Lewis of France called n by the Barons. 
Henry the Third, died 1273. 
Confirmation of the Charter, 

1217 Lewis returns to France. 



1217 Hubert de Burgh, Justiciary. 

Charter again confirmed. 
1221 Friars land in England. 
1223 Charter again confirmed at Oxford. 
1225 (Irish confirmation of Charter. 

1228 Revolt of Faukes de Breaute. 
Stephen Langton's death. 

1229 Papal exactions. 

1230 Failure of Henry's campaign in Poitou. 

1231 Conspiracy against the Italian clergy. 

1232 Fall of Hubert de Burgh. 

1237 Charter again confirmed. 

1238 Earl Simon of Leicester marries Henry's 

sister. 
1241 Defeat of Henry at Taillebourg. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



h:: 



IS 35 Overthrow of the Geraldines in Ireland. 
153S English Bible issued. 

Dissolution of lesser Monasteries. 
1637 Pilgrimage of Grace. 

153S Execution of Lord Exeter and Lady- 
Salisbury. 
1539 Law of Six Articles. 

Suppression of greater Abbeys. 
154-2 [Completion of the Tudor Conquest of 

« Ireland. 
1543 Fall of Cromwell. 
1547 Execution of Earl of Surrey. 

Edi^ard the Siinth, died 1553. 

Sattle of Pinkie Cleugh. 
154@ English Book of Common Prayer. 
154© Western Rebellion. End of Somerset's 
Protectorate. 

1551 Death of Somerset. 

1552 Suppression of Chantries. 

1553 Mary^ died 1559. 
Chancellor discovers Archangel. 

1554 Mary marries Philip of Spain. 
England absolved by Cardinal Pole. 

1555 Persecution of Protestants begins. 
155S Burning of Archbishop Cranmer. 

1557 War with France. 

1558 Loss of Calais. 

1559 Elisabeth^ died 1603. 
' restores Ro3^al Supremacy and 

English Prayer Book. 

1560 War in Scotland. 

1561 ^;Mary Stuart lands in Scotland. 

1562 (Rebellion of Shane O'Neill in Ulster. 

Elizabeth supports French Huguenots. 
First penal statute against Catholics, and 

first Poor Law. 
Hawkins begins Slave Trade with Africa- 

1563 English driven out of Havre. 
Thirty-nine Articles imposed on clergy. 

1565 Mary marries Darnley. 

1566 Darnley murders Rizzio. 
Royal Exchange built. 

1567^JBothwell murders Darnley. 

'<^Defeat and death of Shane O'Neill. 
156B Mary flies to England. 



IS 69 R.evolt of the northern Earls. 

1571 Bull of Deposition issued. 

1572 Conspiracy and death of Norfolk. 
Rising of the Low Countries against M\7i. 
Cartwright's ''Admonition to the Parlia- 
ment." 

1575 Wentworth sent to the Tower. 

1576 First public Theatre in Blackfriars. 

1577 Landing of the Seminary Priests. 
Drake sets sail for the Pacific. 

1578 Lyly's * ' EnpJnies. " 

1579 Spenser publishes "Skel^kerd's Calefidar." 
15®0 Campian and Parsons in England. 

Revolt of the Desmonds. Massacre of 
Smerwick. 
15B3 Plots to assassinate Elizabeth. 

New powers given to Ecclesiastical Com- 
mission. 
15S4 Murder of Prince of Orange. 

Armada gathers in the Tagus. 

Colonization of Virginia. 
1535 English army sent to Netherlands. 

Drake on the Spanish Coast. 
1586 Battle of Zutphen. 

Babington's Plot. 

Shakspers in London. 
I5B7 Death of Mary Stuart. 

Drake burns Spanish fleet at Cadiz. 

Marlotue's " Tajnburlaine." 

1588 Defeat of the Armada. 
Martijt Marprelate Tracts. 

1589 Drake plunders Corunna. 

1590 Publication of the ^''Faerie Queen." 

1593 Shakspere's " Venus and Ado7iis." 

1594 Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." 

1596 y onsen's " Every Man in his H2i7no7a'.'" 
Descent upon Cadiz. 

1597 Ruin of the Second Armada. 
paeon's ''Essays." 

1598 (Revolt of Hugh O'Neill. 

lisps Expedition of Earl of Essex in Ireland. 
|l601 Execution of Essex. 
1603 Mountjoy completes the Conquest of Ire- 
land. 
Death of Elizabeth. 



THE STUARTS. 

1603— I63B. 



1603 James the First;, died 1625. 
Millenary Petition. 

1604 Parliament claims to dea.1 with both 

Church and State. 
Hampton Court Conference. 

1605 Gunpowder Plot. 



1605 Bacon's '' Advance7neni of Learning 
1610 Parliament's Petition of Grievances. 
Plantation of Ulster. 

1613 Marriage of the Elector Palatine. 

1614 First quarrels with the Parliament. 

1615 Trial of the Earl of Somerset. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS, 



1641 



Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke. 

Sale of Peerages. 

Proposals for the Spanish Marriage. 

Death of Shakspere. 

Bacon Lord Keeper. 

Expedition and death of Raleigh. 

The Declaration of Sports. 

Beginning of Thirty Years' V/ar. 

Invasion of the Palatinate. 

Bacons '■'■ Novum Orga^ijcnir 

Landing of the Pilgrim- Fathers in New 

England, 
Impeachment of Bacon. 
James tears out the Pro:;estation of the 

Commons. 
Journey of Charles to Madrid. 
Resolve of War against Spain. 
CharS.8S the First, died 1649. 
First Parliament dissolved. 
Failure of expedition against Cadiz. 
Buckingham impeached. 
Second Parliament dissolved. 
Levy of Benevolence and Forced Loan. 
Failure of expedition to Rochelle. 
The Petition of Right. 
Murder of Buckingham. 
Laud Bishop of London. 
Dissolution of Third Parliament. 
Charter granted to I\Iassachusetts. 
Wentworth Lord President of the 

North. 
Puritan Emigration to New England. 
Wentworth Lord Deputy in Ireland. 
Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. 
Milton s " Allegro " a?id " Pense7'oso." 
Prynne's " Histrio-mastrix." 
Milton s " Co;nus." 
Juxon Lord Treasurer. 
Book of Canons and Common Prayer 

issued for Scotland. 
Hampden refuses to pay Ship-money. 
Revolt of Edinburgh. 
Trial of Hampden. 
Jl/iltons " Lvctcfas." 
The Scotch Covenant. 
Leslie at Dunse Law. 
Pacification of Berwick. 
The Short Parliament. 
The Bishops' War. 
Great Council of Peers at York. 
Long Parliament meets, J\'oz'. 
Execution of Strafford, Maj'. 
Charles visits Scotland. 
The Irish Z\Ia?sacre; Oct. 
The Grand Remonstrance, A'otk 
Impeachment of Five ^Members, j\zh. 



164-2 



164.3 



1644 



1645 



1646 
1647 



1648 



1649 

165© 

1651 

1652 

1653 



Charles before Hull, April. 

Royalists withdraw from Parliament. 

Charles raises Standard at Nottingham 
A 71 gust. 

Battle of Edgehill, Oct 23. 

Hobhes ivrites the " De Give." 

Assembly of Divines assembles at Vv''est- 
minster. 

Rising of the Cornishmen, May 

Death of Hampden, ynne. 

Battle of Roundway Down, 'jicly. 

Siege of Gloucester, Atig, 

Taking of the Covenant, Sept. 23. 

Fight at Cropredy Bridge, yiiiic. 

Battle of IMarston IMoor, Jjdy. 

Surrender of Parliamentary Army in Corn- 
wall, Sept. 

Battle of Tippermuir, Sept. 

Battle of Newbury, Oct. 

Self-renouncing Ordinance, April. 

New Model raised. 

Battle of Naseby, Jicyie 14. 

Battle of Philiphaugh, Sept. 

Charles surrenders to the Scots, May. 

Scots surrender Charles to the Houses, Feb. 

Army elects Adjutators, April. 

The King seized at Holmb}'- House, J^tvic. 

*' Humble Representation" of the Arma'. 
jfune. 

Expulsion of the Eleven IMembers. 

Army occupies London, A iig. 

Flight of the King, Nov. 

Secret Treaty of Charles with the Scots, 
Dec. 

Outbreak of the Royalist Revolt, Feb. 

Revolt of the Fleet, and of Kent, May. 

Fairfax and Cromv^'eH in Essex and 
Wales, y2i)ie — July. 

Battle of Preston, Aug. 18. 

Surrender of Colchester, Aug. 27. 

Pride's Purge, Dec. 

Royal Society begins at Oxford. 

Execution of Charles I., yaji. 30. 

Scotland proclaims Charles II. 

England proclaims itself a Commonwt ahh. 

Cromwell storms Drogheda, A ng. 

Cromwell enters Scotland, Afay. 

Battle of Dunbar, Sept. 3. 

Battle of Worcester, Sept. 3. 

Union with Scotland and Ireland. 

Hobbess * ' L eviathaJi. " 

Outbreak of Dutch \\>.r. May. 

Victory of Tromp, N'ov. 

Victory of Blake, Feb. 

Cromwell drives out the Parliament, 
April iq. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNAI^S. 



1653 Constituent Convention (Barebones Par- I 1671 
liament), July. > 

Convention dissolves, Z>^r. i I67S 

1654- The Instrument of Government. 

Oliver Crom-wellj Liord Pro 

tector, died 165S. 
Peace concluded with Holland. 1S73 

First Protectorate Parliament, Sej!>t 

1655 Dissolution of the Parliament, yn:7i. 
The Major-Generals. 
Settlement of Scotland and Ireland. 1674- 
Settlement of the Church. 

1656 Blake in the Mediterranean. 
War with Spain and Conquest of Jamaica. 1 675 
Second Protectorate Parliam.ent. Se/>t. 

1657 Blake's victory at Santa Cruz. 1676 
Cromwell refuses title of King. • 1677 
Act qf Government. 

1653 Parliamerit dissolved, F'el^. } 

Battle of the Dunes. j 

Capture of Dunkirk. 167S 

Death of Cromwell, Se/>L 3. j 

Kieliard Cromi^i'ell^ LiOrd Pro- j 
tector^ died 1712. 

1659 Third Protectorate Parliament. 
Parliament dissolved. 167© 
Long Parliament recalled. 
Long Parliament again driven out. 

1660 Monk enters London. 
The '' Convention "■> Parliament. 
Charles the Second^ lands at Dover, I680 

May, died 16S5. 
Union of Scotland and Ireland undone. 

1661 Cavalier Parliament begins. 
Act of Uniformity'- re-enacted. 

1662 Puritan clergy driven out. 16S1 
Royal Society at London. 

1663 Dispensing Bill fails. 
1664. Conventicle Act. 16S2 

Dutch War begins. 
1665 Five Mile Act. 1683 

Plague and Fire of London. 
Newto7i's Theory of Fluxions. 

1667 The Dutch in the Medv/ay. 16S4 
Dismissal of Clarendon. 

Peace of Breda. 1635 

Lewis attacks Flanders. 
Milio>is " Pa7'adise Lost." 

1668 The Triple Alliance. 
Peace of Aix-la-Chapeile. 

1669 Ashley shrinks back from toleration to 

Catholics. • IBHB 

1670 Treaty of Dover. 
Bunyans '''' Pilgrivis Progress'' written ^ 

1671 Milton s '^ Paradise Pegained'' and \ 1687 

^^ Samson Agonistcs." \ 



Ne%vto7i^ s Th'^ory of Light. 

Closing of the Exchequer, 

Declaration of Indulgence. 

War begins with Holland. 

Ashley made Chancellor. 

Declaration of Indulgence withdrawn 

The Test Act. 

Shaftesbury dismissed. 

Shaftesbury takes the lead of the Country 

Party. 
Bill of Protestant Securities fails. 
Charles makes peace with Holland. 
Danby Lord Treasurer. 
Treaty of mutual aid between Charles and 

Lewis. 
Shaftesbury sent to the Tower. 
Bill for Security of the Church fails. 
Address of the Commons for War with 

France. 
Prince of Orange marries Mar3^ 
Peace of Nimeguen. 
Gates invents the Popish Plot. 
Fall of Danby. 

New Ministry with Shaftesbviry at its head. 
Temple's plan for a new Council. 
New Parliament meets. 
Habeas Corpus Act passed. 
Exclusion Bill introduced. 
Parliament dissolved. 
Shaftesbury dismissed. 
Committee for agitation formed. 
Monmouth pretends to the throne. 
Petitioners and Abhorrers. 
Exclusion Bill thrown out by the Lords. 
Trial of Lord Stafford. 
Parliament at Oxford. 
Limitation Bill rejected. 
Monmouth and Shaftesbury arrested. 
Conspiracy and flight of Shaftesbury. 
Rye-house Plot. 
Death of Shaftesbury. 
Execution of Lord Russell and Algernon 

Sidney. 
Town charters quashed. 
Army increased. 

Janaes tb.e Second^ died 1701. 
Insurrection of Argyie and Monmouth. 
Battle of Sedgemoor, July 6. 
The Bloody Circuit. 
Army raised to 20,000 men. 
Revocation of Edict of Nantes. 
Parliament refuses to repeal Test Act. 
Te^t Act dispensed with by royal authority- 
Ecclesiastical Commission set up. 
Newtoiis '' Principia" 
Expulsion of tlie Fellows of ^Magdalen. 



CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 



Rochester and Cla- \ 16S8 



L687 Dismissal of Lords 
rendon. 
Declaration of Indulgence. 
The Boroughs regulated. 
William of Orange protests against 

Declaration. 
Tyrconnell made Lord Deputy in Ireland. 



the 



Clergy refuse to read Declaration of 

dulgence. 
Threat of the Seven Bishops. 
Irish troops brought over to England 
Lewis attacks Germany. 
William of Orange lands at Torbay. 
Flight of James, 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



1639—1874.. 



1689 



1690 



1691 

1692. 

1693 
1694 

1696 

1697 
1693 
1700 
1701 



J702 

1704 

1705 
170S 
1707 
1708 

17C9 
1710 

1712 
1713 
1714. 



Convention Parliament. 
Declaration of Rights. 
■William ar^-d Mary made King 
and Queen. 

William forms the Grand Alliance against 

Lewis. 
Battle of Killiecrankie, Jtdy, 27. 
Siege of Londonderry. 
Mutiny Bill. 
Toleration Bill. 
Bill of Rights. 
Secession of the Non-jurors. 
Abjuration Bill and Act of Grace. 
Battle of Beachy Head, June 29. 
Battle of the Boyne, Jtcly 6. 
William repulsed from Limerick. 
Battle of Aughrim, Jnly. 
Capitulation and Treaty of Limerick. 
Massacre of Glencoe. 
Battle of La Hogue, May 19. 
Sunderland's plan of a Miiiis.t-y. 
Bank of England set up. 
Death of Mary. 
Currency restored. 
Peace of Ryswick. 
First Partition Treaty. 
Second Partition Treaty. 
Duke of Anjou becomes King of Spain. 
Death of James the Second. 
Act of Settlement passed. 
Anne, died 1714. 
Battle of Blenheim, August 13. 
Harley and St. John take office. 
Victories of Peterborough in Spain. 
Battle of Ramiliies, May 23. 
Act of Union with Scotland. 
Battle of Oudenarde. 
Dismissal of Harle}^ and St. John. 
Battle of MalpLaquet. 
Trial of Sacheverel. 
Tory Ministry of Harley and ?t Johp. 
Dismissal of IMarlborou^h. 
Treaty of Utrecht. 

G-sorge tlie lirst, died 1727. 



1714- 
1715 
1716 

1717 
1718 
1720 

1721 
1722 
1727 

1729 
1 1730 
! 1731 
! 1733 



1737 
1738 
1739 
174.0 
174.2 
174.3 

174.5 



174.6 B; 

1748 
1751 
1754. 

1755 

1756 

1757 

1758 



Ministry of Townshend and Walpole. 

Jacobite Revolt under Lord Mar. 

Ministry of Lord Stanhope. 

The Septennial Bill. 

The Triple Alliance. 

The Quadruple Alliance. 

Failure of the Peerage Bill. 

The South Sea Company. 

Ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. 

Exile of Bishop Atterbury. 

War with Austria and Spain. 

George the Second; died 1760. 

Treaty of Seville. 

Free exportation of American rice ailo-^ed 

Treaty of Vienna. 

Walpole's Excise Bill. 

War of the Polish Succession. 

Family Compact between Francs and 

Spain. 
Death of Queen Caroline. 
The Methodists afi^car in London. 
War declared with Spain. 
War of the Austrian Succession. 
Resignation of Walpole. 
Ministry of Henry Pelliam. 
Battle of Dettingen, Jntie 27. 
Battle of Fonteno3^ May 31. 
Charles Edward lands in Scotland. 
Battle of Prestonpans, Sept. ci. 
Charles Edward reaches Derby, Dec. 4. 

iattle of Falkirk, Jan. 23. 
Battle of Culloden, Aj^ril 16. 
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
Clive's surprise of Arcot. 
Death of Henr^^ Pelham. 
Ministry of Duke of Newcastle. 
The Seven Years' Vv^ar. 
Defeat of General Braddock. 
Loss of Port Mahon. 
Retreat of Admiral Byng. 
Convention of Closter-Seven, 
Ministry of William Pitt. 
Battle of Plasse3\ Jwte 23. 
Capture of Louisburg and Cape Breton. 



CHRONOLCGICAL ANNALS. 



17SS Capture of Fort Duquesne. 
1769 Battle of Mladen, Aiigzist i. 

Battle of Quiberon Bay, Nov. 20. 

Capture of Fort Niagara andTiconcieroga. 

Wolfe's victor}'- on heights of Abraham. 

1760 Georg-e the Third; died 1820. 
Battle of Wandev/ash. 

1761 Ministry of Lord Bute. 
B7'indley's Canal over the IrzvelL 

1762 Peace of Pans. 

1 763 Wedgeivood establishes potteries. 

1764 Hargreaves invents Spiiviing Jenny. 

1765 Stamp Act passed. 

Ministry of Lord Rockingham. 
Meeting and Protest of American Con- 
gress. 
Wait invents Stea^n Engine. 

1766 Repeal of the Stamp Act. 
Ministry of Lord Chatham. 

176S Ministry of the Duke of Grafton. 

Expulsion of Wilkes from House of Com- 
mons. 
Arkwright invents Spinning Machine. 

1769 Wilkes three times elected for Middlesex. 
House of Commons seats Col. Luttreli. 
Occupation of Boston by British troops. 
Letters of Jitnins. 

1770 Ministry of Lord North. 

Chatham's proposal of Parliamentary Re- 
form. 

1771 Last attempt to prevent Parliamentar}- 

reporting. 
Bcgvinijig 0/ the great EnglisJi Jotirnals. 
1773 Hastings appointed Governor-General. 

Boston tea-ships. 
1774. Military occupation of Boston. 
Its port closed. 

Massachusetts Charter altered. 
Congress assembles at Philadelphia. 
17^5 Rej ection of Chatham's plan of conciliation- 
Skirmish at Lexington. 
Americans, under Washington, besiege 

Boston. 
Battle of Bunker's Hill. 
. Southern Colonies expel their Governors. 

1776 Crompton inve7tty the Mule. 
Arnold invades Canada. 
Evacuation of Boston. 
Decbratiofti of Independence, July 4. 
Battles of Brooklyn and Trenton. 
Adam Smith's " Wealth of Nations." 

1777 Battle of Brandywine. 
Surrender of Saratoga, Oct. 13. 
Chatham proposes Feder-al Union. 
Washington at Valley P'orge. 

1778 Alliance of France with United States. 



1778 
1779 



1780 



1781 



1782 



Death of Chatham, April 7. 
Alliance of Spain with United States. 
Siege of Gibraltar. 

Armed Neutrahty of Northern Powers. 
The Irish Volunteers. 
Cornwallis captures Charleston. 
Descent of Hyder Ali on the Carnatic. 
Defeat of Hyder at Porto Novo. 
Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. 
Ministry of Lord Rockingham. 
Victories of Rodney. 
i Repeal of Poyning's Act. 

Pitt's Bill for Parliamentary Reform. 
Burke's Bill of Economical Reform. 
Shelburne Ministry. 
Repulse of Allies from Gibraltar, 
Treaties of Paris and Versailles. 
Coalition Ministry of Fox and North. 
Fox's India Bill. 
Ministry of Pitt- 
Pitt's India Bill. 
Sinking Fund and Excise. 
Parliamentary Reform Bill. 
/Free Trade Bill between England and 

Ireland. 
Trial of Warren Hastings. 
Treaty of Commerce with France. 
The Regency Bill. 

Meeting of States-General at Versailles. 
New French Constitution. 
Triple Alliance for defence of Turkey. 
Quarrel over Nootka Sound. 
Pitt defends Poland. 
Burke's " Refections 07i the Fi'cnch 

Revolution." 
Representative Government set up in 

Canada. 
Fox's Libel Act. 
B'urkes ^'' Appeal froin the New to the 

Old Whigs." 
Pitt hinders Holland from joining the 

Coalition. 
France opens the Scheldt. 
Pitt's efforts for peace. 
C The United Irishmen. 
1793 France declares War on England. 
Part of Whigs join Pi':t. 
English army lands in Flanders. 
1794- English driven from Toulon. 
English driven from Holland. 
Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act. 
Victory of Lord Howe, y7me 21. 
179S Battle of Cape St. Vincent. 

Bitrke's " Letters 071 a Regicide Peace " 
1797 England alone in the War with France, 
Battle of Camperdown. 



1783 



1784 

1785 



17^6 
1787 
1788 

i7e9 



17@0 



1791 



1792 




CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS, 



Irish revolt crushed at Vinegar Hill. 
Battle of the Nile. 

Pitt revives the Coalition against France. 
Conquest of M^'sore. 
Surrender of Malta to English Fleet. 
Armed Neutrality of Northern Powers. 
f Act of Union with Ireland. 
I .George the Third, rejects Pitt's plan of 
\ Catholic Emancipation. 
Administration of Mr. Addington. 
Surrender of French army in Eg^^pt. 
Battle of Copenhagen. 
Peace of Amiens. 

Publication of Ed'nhiirgh Review. 
Buonaparte declares War. 
Battle of Assaye. 
Second P>/Imistry of Pitt. 
Battle of Trafalgar, Oct. 21. 
Death of Pitt, Jan. 23. 
Ministry of Lord Grenville. 
Death of Fox. 
Ordei's in Council. 
Abolition of Slave Trade. 
Ministry of Duke of Portland. 
Seizure of Danish fleet. 
America passes Non-Intercourse Act. 
Battle of Vimiera, and Convention of 

Cintra. 
Battle of Corunna, Jan. 16. 
Wellesley drives Soult from Oporto. 
Battle of Talavera, ^/z/j' 27. 
Expedition against Walcheren. 
Ministry of Spencer Perceval. 
Revival of Parliamentary Ileform. 
Battle of Busaco. 
Lines of Torres Vedras. 
Prince of Wales becomes Regent. 
Battle of Fuentes d'Onore, May 5. 
Wellington repulsed from Badajoz and 

Almeida. 
Luddite Riots. 

Assassination of Spencer Perceval. 
Ministry of Lord Liverpool 
Storm of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. 
America declares War against England. 
Battle of Salamanca, Ji^ly 22. 
Wellington retreats from Burgos. 
Victories of American Frigates. 
Battle of Vittoria, Jiine 21. 
Battles of the Pyrenees. 
Wellington enters France, Oct. 
Americans attack Canada. 
Battle of Orthez. 
Battle of Toulouse, April 10. 
Battle of Chippewa, Jiily. 
Raid upon Washington. 



IBI4. British repulses at Plattsburg and New 

Orleans. 
1315 Battle of Quatre Bras, Jime 16. 

Battle of Waterloo, Jiuie 18. 

Treaty of Vienna. 

1519 Manchester Massacre. 

1520 Cato Street Conspiracy. 
George the Fourth, died 1S30. 
Bill for the Queen's Divorce. 

1822 Canning Foreign Minister. 

1823 Mr. Huskisson joins the Ministry. 

1826 Expedition to Portugal. 
Recognition of South American States. 

1827 Ministry of Mr. Canning. 
Ministry of Lord Goderich. 
Battle of Navarino. 

1828 Ministry of Duke of V/ellington. 

1829 Catholic Emancipation Bill. 

1830 William tlis Fourth, died 1837. 
Ministry of Lord Grey. 

Opening of Liverpool ajid Ma^ichcsicr 
Railway. 

1831 Reform Agitation. 

1832 Parliamentary Reform Bill passed, JiDie-^,, 

1833 Suppression of Colonial Slavery. 
East India trade thrown open. 

1834 Pilinistry of Lord Melbourne. 
New Poor Law. 

System of National Education begun. 
Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. 
1S35 Ministry of Lord ^Melbourne replaced. 
Municipal Corporation Act. 

1836 General Registration Act. 
Civil Marriages Act. 

1837 Victoria. 

1033 Committee of Privy Council for Education 
instituted. 

Demands for a People's Charter. 

Formation of An ti- Corn-Lav/ League. 

Revolt in Canada. 

V/ar with China. 

Occupation of Cabul. 
184-0 Quadiuple Alliance with France, Porti:gaI 
and Spain. 

Bombardment of Acre. 
le^-l Ministry of Sir Robert Peel. 

Income Tax revived. 

Peace with China. 

Massacre of Engiisli Army in Affghani- 
stan. 
184-2 Victories of Pollock in Affghanistan. 
184-5 Battles of Moodkee and Ferozeshah. 
1846 Battle of Sobraon. 

Annexation of Scinde. 

Repeal of the Corn Laws. 
1S47 Ministry of Lord John Russell. 



XX iv 


CHRONOLOGICAL ANNALS. 


1S4.3 


Suppression of the Chartists anJ 


Irish 


185S 


Second Ministry of Lord Derby, 




rebels. 




IS59 


Second Ministry of Lord Palmerston. . 




Victory of Goojerat. 




1865 


Ministry of Lord Russell. 




Annexation of the Punjaub. 




1866 


Third Ministry of Lord Derby. 


1852 


jNIinistry of Lord Derby. 




1867 


Parhamentary Reform Bill. ' 


1853 


Ministry of Lord Aberdeen. 




1868 


Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, 


1854. 


AlHance with France against Russia. 






Ministry of Mr. Gladstone. 




Siege of Sebastopoi. 




1869 


Abolition of compulsory Church Rates. 




Battle of Inkermann, Nov. 5. 






Disestablishment of Episcopal Church in 


1855 


Ministry of Lord Palmerston. 






. Ireland. • 




Capture of Sebastopoi. 




1870 


Urish Land Bill, 


1856 


Peace of Paris with Russia. 






Education Bill. 


1857 


Sepoy Mutiny in Bengal. 




1871 


Abolition of religious tests in L^niversities. 


1858 


Sovereignty of India transferred t 
Crown. 


the 




Army Bill. 

Ballot Bill. 1 




Volunteer movement. 




1874 


Second Ministry of Mr. Disraeli. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



KINGS OF THE HOUSE OF CERDIC, FROM ECGBERHT. 



ECGBERHT, 

r. 802-837. 

I 

iETHELWULF, 

r. 837-838. 



i I 1 ^ 

yETHELBALD, iETHELBERHT, iETHELRED I. N.l.Y'R.^Y^ ^ Ealhs'wtth. 
r. 858-860. r. 860-866. r. 866-871. r. 871-901. I 



EADWARD 

THE ELDER, 

r. 901-925. 

I 



^THELSTAN, EADMUND,= ^^y^?^. EADRED, 
r. 925-940. r. 940-946. I r. 946-955. 



EADWIG, 1. ^thelflced — EADGAR, = 2. Mlfthryih. 

r- 955-959- I r. 959-975- I 



1 

EADWARD 

THE MARTYR, 

r. 975-979- 




1. Name = 
uncertai7i. 


.ETHELRED II. 

r. 979-1016. 


r^ 2. Einma of 
Norjnandy - 

1 


= 2. Cnut, 
r. 1017-1035^ 


f 

EADMUND IRONSIDE, 

r. Ap. 23-Nov. 30, 

1016, 

m. Ealdgyth. 


Ealfred, 
killed 1036. 


EADWARD 

THE 
CONFESSOR, 

r. 1042-1066. 


Harthacnut, 
r. 1040-1042. 


\ 
Eadmund. 




1 
Eadward, 
d. 1057, 
m. Agatha. 

\ 




1 

Eadgar, 

elected 

King in 

1066. 




1 

Margaret, 

d. 1093, 

ni Malcolm III, 

King of Scots. 

Matilda, 
d. 1T18, 
fn. Henry I. 
King of 
England. 


1 

Christina, 

a nun. 





DANISH KINGS. 



THE DANISH KINGS. 



SWEGEN FORKBEARD. 
d. 1014. 



CNUT = Emma of Normandy, widow 
r. loi 7-1035. of King ^thelred II. 

I i , 



Swegen. HAROLD I. HARTHACNUT, 

r. 1035-1040. r. 1040-1042. 



Illegitimate. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES, 



DUKES OF THE NORMANS, 



ROLF, 

ist Duke of the Normans. 
r. 911-927. 

WILLIAM 

LONGSWORD, 

r. 927-943- 

I 

RICHARD 

THE FEARLESS, 

r. 943-996- 

I 



RICHARD 

THE GOOD, 

r. 996-1026. 



Emma, 
m. I. JEthelred II. of 

Englarid, 

m. 2. Cftut of Englajid 

a7id Demnark. 



RICHARD in. 

r. 1026-102S. 



I 

ROBERT II. 

r. 1087-1096. 

(from 1096 to 1 1 CO 

the Duchy was 

held by his 
brother WilHam,) 

and 1100-1106, 
(when he was over- 
thrown at Tinche- 
brai by his 
brother Henry.) 



ROBERT 

THE MAGNIFICENT, 

r. 1028-1035. 

i 

WILLIAM 

THE CONQUEROR, 
r. T035-1087. 

I 



WILLIAM 

RUFUS, 

r. 1 096-1 100. 



HENRY I. 

r. 1106-1135. 



Matilda, 
m. GEOFFRY, 

COUNT OF ANJOU 
AND MAINE 

(who won the 
Duchy from 

Stephen). 

HENRY 11. 

invested with the 

Duchy 1 1 50, 

d. 1189 



Adela, 

tn. Stephen, 

Count of Bids. 

I 

STEPHEN 

OF BLOIS, 

s. 1135. 



I 

RICHARD 

THE LION-HEART, 

r. 1189-1199. 



JOHN, 

r. 1 199-- 1 204. 

(when Normandy was conquered 

by France.) 



EDWARD III. 



HENRY IV. 



Claim of EDWARD III. to the French Crown. 



PHILIP III. 

THE BOLD, 

r. 1270-1285. 

I 



PHILIP IV. 

THE FAIR, 

r. 1285-1314. 



Charles, Count 
of Valois, 
d. 1325. 



LEWIS X. 
r. T314-1316. 



JOHN I^ 

15 Nov. -19 Nov. 
1316. 



PHILIP V. 

THE LONG, 

r. 1316-1322. 



I 

CHARLES IV. 

THE FAIR, 

r. 1322-1328. 



I 

Isabel, 

';/. Edivard II. 

of England. 

Edward III. 
of England. 



PHILIP VI. 

OF VALOIS. 

r. 1328-1350. 

I 

JOHN II. 

THE GOOD, 

r. 1^50-1364. 



Descent of HENRY IV. 



HENRY III. 



EDWARD I. 



Edmund, 
Earl of Lancaster. 



EDWARD II. 



EDWARD III. 



I 
Thomas, 
Earl of Lancaster, 
beheaded, 1322. 



Henry, 

Earl of Lancaster. 

I 

I 

Henry, 

Duke of Lancaster. 



John of Gaunt, 
Duke of Lancaster. 



Blanche 
of Lancaster. 



HENRY IV. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES, 



HOUSE OF 



EDWARD 



Lionel, Duke 

of Clarence. 

. I 

Philippa, 

fit. Edmund 

Mortimer^ 

Earl of March. 

I 

Roger Mortimer, 

Earl of March. 



Edmund 

Mortimer, 

Earl of March, 

d. 1424. 



Anne Morti- 



Richard 
Duke cf 
slain nt 



I 
EDWARD IV. 



Edmund, 
Earl of Rutland, 
slain at Wake- 
field, 1460. 



EDWARD 
V. 



Richard, 

Duke of 

York. 



Elizabeth, 

m. HENRY 

VII. 



Katharine, 

m. Sir 

William 

Courte?iay. 



Henry 
Courtenay 
Marquess 
of Exeter, 
beheaded 
1538. 

Edward 

Courtenay, 

Earl of Devon, 

d. 1556. 



I 

George, 

Duke of 

Clarence, 

m. Isabel Neville. 

I 



r 

Edward, 

Earl of 

Warwick, 

beheaded 

1499. 



Margaret, 

Countess of 

Salisbury, 

beheaded 

1541, 

%t. Sir Richard 

Pole, 

I 



Henry Pole, 

Lord 

Montagu, 

beheaded 



HOUSE OF YORK. 



YORK. 

III. 



Edmund of 

Langley, 

Duke of York. 



ler = Richard, 
I Earl of Cam- 
bridge, 
I beheaded 1415. 
Plantagenet, 
York, 
Wakefield, 1460. 



RICHARD III. 

w. A nne Neville. 



Edward, 

Prince of Wales, 

d. 1484. 



Elizabeth = Johtt de la Pole, 
Duke of Suffolk. 



John de la Pole, 

Earl of Lincoln, 

slain at Stoke, 1487. 



iVIa.rgaret, 
m. Charles, Duke of 

B7i7-g7l7ldy. 



Edmund de la Pole, 
Earl of Suffolk, 
beheaded 1513. 



Richard de la Pole, 

slain at the battle 

of Pa via, 1525 



Reginald Pcle, 

Archbishop of 

Canterbury, 

and Cardinal, 

d. 1558. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



en 
< 
o 
z 

< 

o 









*r '^ 






a o 




^ 


-^(j) 


03 


n 


W^H 


^fi 








^ '- 




o 


o b 






^w 


d 





- ^< 






Q 






^. 



CO IS 



■?i ►^ J^ 






y* <ii a 

fl O ^ I 
g O ^ 



OS o 









c ^ 6 ^ <u ^^ 
3^ •" ^ 



— S 
Wpq 






(1) O QJ « 









o^ 









S^.l 









^1 



tssss: 



DAUGHTERS OF HENRY VI 1. 



^^ 



W 
fa 

o 

CO 

^ 
W 
H 
% 
O 
D 
< 
Q 

W 

H 

fa 
O 

< 

Q 
o 
Q 



O I jC 



-■^p^ 









'^ ►^ s ~ 


_c^ 




n 




1 

! 








i 


11 












1 <^ ^ i- 

5= a5"3 












•5'? y 


11 




•^ 








1 ^ 




.^ in 














>Mn 










>^^ 
H ^,^ 




0, M 








11 



:^k ^ 

s^-^ 



•-»'?. 



is o 

5 c 








■^ 




k 








^ 


II 






i t 














g 0? 



o> Co 



C 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 

Since the 



WILLIAM L 
4^^ m. Matilda 



Robert, 

Duke of Normandy, 

b. about 1056, 

d. 1134. 

William, 

Count of Flanders, 

b. iioi, d. 1128. 



WILLIAM IL 

b. about 1060, 



Henry, 

b. 1155, d. II 



RICHARD I. 

b. 1 157, d. 1 199. 



SOVEREIGNS OF ENGLAND. 



OF ENGLAND. 



Nor7nan Conquest. 



b. about 1027, d. 108 
of Fla7iders. 



I 



HENRY I. 

b. 1068, 

d. 1135. 

m. I. Matilda of 

Scotland. 

Matilda, 
d. 1167, 
nt. 2. Geoffrey^ 
Cotint of 
A njou. 

HENRY II. 

b. 1133, d. 1189. 

JH. Eleanor of 

Aquitaine. 

I 



Geoffrey, 

b. ii58,d. 1186 

tft. Consta?ice, 

heiress of 

Brttanny. 

I 

Arthur, 

Duke of 

Britanny, 

b. 1187. 



I 

Adela, 

d. 1137. 

m. Stephen, 

Count of 

Blots. 

■ I 

STEPHEN, 

d. 1154. 
vi. Matilda 
of Boulogne. 



I 
Eustace, 
Count of 
Boulogne, 
d. 1153. 



JOHN, 

b. 1166, d. 1 2 16. 
m. 2. Isabel of 
A ngoiiletne. 

I 

HENRY III. 

b. 1207, d. 1272. 

rn. Eleanor of 

Provence. 

EDWARD I. 

b. 1239, d. 1307. 

m. I. Eleanor 

qf Castile. 

I 

EDWARD II. 

b. 1284, 

murdered 1327. 

7n. Isabel of 

France. 

\ 

EDWARD III. 

b. 1312, d. 1377. 

m. Philippa of 

Hainault. 

I 

\Se^ next page.'] 



William, 
Count of 
Boulogne, 
d. 1160. 



1 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 



EDWARD 



Edward, 
Prince of 
Wales, 
b. 1330, 
d. 1376. 



Lionel, 
Duke ot 
Clarence, 
b. 1338, 
d. 1368 



I. Blanche, ■ 
daughter of 
Henry, Duke of 
Lancaster. 



John of Gaunt, 

Duke of 

Lancaster, 

b. about 1340, 

d. 1399. 



3. Katharine 
Szuyn/ord. 



RICH.IL 

b. 1366, 

deposed 

1399 



Philippa, 

;;2. Edmund 

Mortimer^ 

Earl of 

March. 

I 



Mortimer, 

Earl of 

March. 

I 



1 
Edmund 
Mortimer, 
Earl of 
March, 
d. 1424. 



Anne 
Mortimer, 
m. Richard, 
Earl of 
Cam- 
bridge, 
7uho was 
beheaded, 
1415- 



HENRY IV. 

b. 1366, d. 1413 
771. J.. Mar;) 
Bohu7t. 



de 



John Beaufort, 
Earl of Somerset. 



HENRY V. John Beaufort, 

b. 1388, d. 1422, Duke of 

ni. Katharine of Somerset. 

France, who = 2. Owen Tudor. 



HENRY VL 

b. 142 1, Tudor, Earl 

d. 1471, of Richmond. 

fit. Margaret of 

A 7tJ07C, 



Edward, 

Prince of Wales, 

b. i453» 

slain at 

Tewkesbury, 

1471. 



Edmund = Margaret 
Beaufort. 



HENRY VIL 

b. 1456, d. 1509. 



I, Katharine = HENRY VIH. = 2. Anne Boleyn. = -^.JaneSeyjuour. 
oj Aragon. b. 1491, d. 1547. 



MARY, 

b. 1516, d. 1558. 
m. Philip of Spain. 



ELIZABETH, 

b. 1533, d. 1603. 



EDWARD VT. 

b. 1537. d. 1553- 



SOVEREIGNS OF ENGLAND, 



OF ENGLAND — continued. 



III. 



Edmund of 

Langley, 

Duke of York, 

b. 1341, d. 1402. 



Richard, 

Earl of Cambridge, 

beheaded 1415. 

m. Anne 

Mortimer. 



EDWARD IV. 

b. 1442, d. 1483. 

m. Elizabeth. 

Wydevile. 



\ \ 

Elizabeth, EDWARD 
d. 1503. V. 

b. 1470. 



I 

Margaret, 

b. 1489, d. 1541. 

?;/. I. Jai7tes iV 

King of Scots. 



James V. 

King of Scots, 

d. 1542. 

I 

Mary, 

Queen of Scots, 

beheaded 1587. 

I 

JAMES I. 

b. 1566, d. 1625. 

■}n. A 7tne o/Denjnark. 

I 

See next Page.l 



Richard Plantagenet, 

Duke of York, 

slain at 

Wakefield, 1460. 

I 



I 

George, Duke of 

Clarence, b.i449,d. 1478. 



Richard, 
Duke of 

York, 
b. 1472. 



\ 

Edward, 

Earl of 

Warwick, 

beheaded 

1499. 



I 
Margaret, 
Countess of 
Salisbury, 
beh. 1541, 
7)1. Sir 
Richard 
Pole. 



Mary, 

b. T498, d, 1533. 

in. 2. Charles 

Bra7)don, Duke oj 

S7l^0tk. 

I 

Frances Brandon, 

77t. He7iry Grey, 

Djike of Suffolk. 

I 

Jane Grey, 

beheaded 1554. 

m. Lord Guilford 

Dudley. 



RICHARD III. 

b. 1452, d. 1485. 
m.Aiuie NevilU\ 



Edward, 
Prince of Wales, 
b. 1473, d. 1484. 



GENEALOGICAL TABLES. 



THE SOVEREIGNS 



JAMES 



CHARLES I. 

b. 1600, beheaded 1649. 
m. Henrietta Maria of France. 



I 
CHARLES 11. I. Anne Hyde =i JAMES H. = 2. Mary of 

b. 1630, d. 1685. b. 1633, Modena. 

d. 1701, 



MARY, 
b. 1662, 
d, 1694. 

WILLIAM 
III 



ANNE, 
b. 1665, 
d. 1714. 



James Francis 

Edward Stuart, 

the Old 

Pretender, 

b. 1688, d. 1766. 

I 



1 

Mary, 

b. 1631, d. 1660. 

m, Wiiliam, 
Prince of Orange _ 



WILLIAM IIL 

b. 1650, d. 1702. 
m. MARY OF 
ENGLAND. 



Charles 
Edward 

Stuart, the 
Young 

Pretender, 
b. 1720, 
d. 1788. 



Henry- 
Benedict 
Stuart, 
Cardinal 

York, 
b. 1725, 
d. 1807. 



SOyEREIGNS OF ENGLAND. 



OF EInGLAND — continued. 



Elizabeth, 

b. 1596, d. 1662. 

nt. Frederick, 

Elector Palatine. 

1 

Sophia, 

d. 1714. 
vt. Erytest A 7(g7(stus, 
Elector of Hanover. 



GEORGE I. 

b. 1660, d 1727. 

?. Sophia DorotJiea 

0/ Zell. 



GEORGE 11. 

b. 1683, d. 1760. 

in, Carolvie of 

Brandeub^irg- 

Anspach. 

Frederick, 
Prince of Wales, 
b. 1707, d. 1751. 

I 
GEORGE III. 
b. 1738, d. 1820.^ 
7n. Charlotte of 
Mecklejibn rg- 
Strelitz. 
I 



GEORGE IV. 

b. 1762, d. 1830. 

tn. Caroline of 

Brunswick- 

Wolfenbiittel. 

Charlotte, 
b. 1796, d. 1817. 



WILLIAM IV. 

b. 1765, d. 1837. 



I 

Edward, 

Duke of Kent, 

b. 1767, d. 1820. 



VICTORIA, 

b. 1819, 

m. Prince A Ibert of 

Saxe-Coburg and 

Gotha. 



Ernest Augustus, 
King of Hanover, 
b. 1771, d. 1851. 




W.Gr. £.&r. 

Startfarcis Geog^ Estai^, 55 Charing Cross. 



London : Macmiilan & Co . 



A SHORT HISTORY 



THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



CHAPTER L 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 
Section I.— Britain and the Bnglisb. 

{Authorities for the constitution and settlement of the English, see 
Kembie's ** Saxons in England," and especially the "Constitutional History 
of England" by Professor Stubbs. Sir Francis Palgrave's History of the 
English Commonwealth is valuable, but to be used with care. A vigorous 
and accurate sketch of the early constitution may be found in Mr. Freeman's 
History of the Norman Conquest, vol. i.] 



For the fatherland of the English race v^^e must look far away from 
England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one 
country which bore the name of England was what we now call 
Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic 
from the Northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black- timbered 
homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple 
water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the 
coast with sunless woodland, broken only on the western side by 
meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers 
in this district were one out of three tribes, all belonging to the same 
Low German branch of the Teutonic family, who at the moment 
when history discovers them were bound together into a confederacy 
by the ties of a common blood and a common speech. To the north 
of the English lay the tribe of the Jutes, whose name is still preserved 
4 5> B 



Old 
£ norland. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



rCHA?. 



Src. I. 

Britain- 
AMD THK 
English. 



The 
English 
People. 



in their district of Jutland. To the south of them the tribe of the 
Saxons wandered over the sand-flats of Holstein, and along the 
marshes of Friesland and the Elbe. How close was the union of these 
tribes was shown by their use of a common name, while the choice of 
this name points out the tribe which at the moment when we first 
meet them must have been strongest and most powerful in the con- 
federacy. Although they were all known as Saxons by the Roman 
people who touched them only on their southern border where the 
Saxons dwelt, and who remained ignorant of the very existence of the 
English or the Jutes, the three tribes bore among themselves the name 
of the central tribe of their league, the name of Englishmen. 

Of the temper and life of these EngHsh folk in this Old England we 
know little. But, from the glimpses which we catch of them when con- 
quest had brought these Englishmen to the shores of Britain, their 
political and social organization must have been that of the German 
race to which they belonged. The basis of their society w^as the free 
landholder. In the English tongue he alone was known as " the man," or 
" the churl ; " and two English phrases set his freedom vividly before us. 
He was " the free-necked man," whose long hair floated over a neck 
that had never bent to a lord. He was " the weaponed man," who 
alone bore spear and sword, for he alone possessed the right which in 
such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage, the 
right of private war. Justice had to spring from each man's personal 
action ; and every freeman was his own avenger. But, even in the 
earliest forms of English society of which we catch traces, this right of 
self-defence was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of 
public justice. The " blood-wite," or compensation in money for per- 
sonal wrong, was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private 
revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's limb had each on this 
system its legal price. " Eye for eye," ran the rough code, and " life 
for life," or for each fair damages. We see a further step towards the 
recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man, but to 
the people at large, in another custom of the very earliest times. 
The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he 
wronged, but by the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family oi 
house of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each 
little group of English people upon the blood-bond which knit its 
families together ; every outrage was held to have been done by alj 
who were linked by blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been- 
committed to all who were linked by blood to the sufferer from it. 
From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restrain- 
ing the wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet 
possess sprang the tirst rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman 
was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hindei 
him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with and pay for him if wTong were 



T] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 



done. So fully was this principle recognized that, even if any ma: 
was charged before his fellow- tribesmen with crime, his kinsfolk stili 
remained in fact his sole judges ; for it was by their solemn oath of his 
innocence or his guilt that he had to stand or fall. 

The blood-bond gave both its military and social form to Old English 
society. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the 
feelings of honour and discipline were drawn from the common duty of 
every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they 
fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the soil. 
Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing ; and each "wick" 
or "ham" or " stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who 
dwelt together in it. The home or " ham " of the Billings would be 
BiUingham, and the "tun" or town of the Harlings would be Harlington. 
But in such settlements, the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie 
of land. Land with the German race seems everywhere to have been the 
accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly the free- 
holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of the 
community to which he belonged was inseparable from the possession 
of his " holding." The landless man ceased for all practical purposes to 
be free, though he was no man's slave. In the very earliest glimpse 
we get of the German race we see them a race of land-holders and 
land-tillers. Tacitus, the first Roman who looked closely at these 
destined conquerors of Rome, found them a nation of farmers, pasturing 
on the forest glades around their villages, and ploughing their village 
fields. A feature which at once struck him as parting them from the 
civilized world to which he himself belonged was their hatred of cities 
and their love even within their little settlements of a jealous in- 
dependence. " They live apart," he says, " each by himself, as 
woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him." And as each dweller 
within the settlement was jealous of his own isolation and inde- 
pendence among his fellow-settlers, so each settlement was jealous 
of its independence among its fellow-settlements. Each little farmer- 
commonwealth was girt in by its own border or "mark,'' a belt of 
forest or waste or fen which parted it from its fellow-villages, a ring 
of common ground which none of its settlers might take for his own, 
but which served as a death-ground where criminals met their doom, 
and was held to be the special dwelling-place of the nixie and the 
will-o'-the-wisp. If a stranger came through this wood or over this 
waste, custom bade him blow his horn as he cam-e, for if he stole 
through secretly he was taken for a foe, and any man might lawfully 
slay him. Within the village we find from the first a marked social 
difierence between two orders of its indwellers. The bulk of its home- 
steads were those of its freemen or " ceorls ; " but amongst these were 
the larger homes of " eorls," or men distinguished among their fellow^s 
by noble blood, who were held in an hereditary reverence, and from 

B 2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 
Britain 

AND THE 

English. 



Tlie 
Religion, 



whom the " ealdormen '' of the village were chosen as leaders in war- 
time or rulers in time of peace. But the choice v/as a purely voluntary 
one, and the man of noble blood enjoyed no legal privilege above his 
fellows. The actual sovereignty within the settlement resided in the 
body of its freemen. Their homesteads clustered round a moot-hill, or 
round a sacred tree, where the whole community met to administer 
its own justice and to frame its own laws. Here the field was passed 
from man to man by the deliveiy of a turf cut from its soil, and 
the strife of farmer with farmer was settled according to the "cus- 
toms " of the settlement, as its " elder-inen " stated them, and the 
wrong-doer was judged and his fine assessed by the kinsfolk. Here, 
too, the " witan," the Wise Men of the village, met to settle ques- 
tions of peace and war, to judge just judgment, and frame wise 
laws, as their descendants, the Wise Men of a later England, meet in 
Parliament at Westminster, to frame laws and do justice for the great 
empire which has sprung from this little body of farmer-common- 
wealths in Sleswick. 

The religion of the English was the same as that of the whole 
German family. Christianity, which had by this time brought about 
the conversion of the Roman Empire, had not penetrated as yet among 
the forests of the North. The common god of the English people, as 
of the whole German race, was Woden, the war-god, the guardian of 
ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed the invention 
of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its 
kings. Our own names for the days of the week still recall to us the 
gods whom our English fathers worshipped in their Sleswick home- 
land. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunderj 
or, as the Northmen called him, Thor, the god of air and storm and 
rain ; Friday is Frea's-day, the goddess of peace and joy and fruitful- 
ness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase 
to every field and stall they visited. Saturday commemorates an 
obscure god Soetere ; Tuesday the Dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was 
death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn, or of the spring, lends hei 
name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these 
floated the dim shapes of an older mythology, " Wyrd," the death- 
goddess, whose memory lingered long in the " weird " of northern 
superstition, or the Shield-Maidens, the " mighty women " who, an old 
rime tells us, "wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the 
shrilling javehns." Nearer to the popular fancy lay the deities of wood 
and fell, or the hero-gods of legend and song, "Nicor" the water- 
sprite who gave us our water-nixies and "Old Nick,^' " Weland'' the 
forger of mighty shields and sharp-biting swords at a later time in his 
Berkshire " Weyland's smithy," or ^gil, the hero-archer, whose legend 
is that of Cloudesly or Tell. A nature worship of this sort lent itself ill 
to the purposes of a priesthood, and though a priestly class existed it 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 



seems at no time to have had much weight in the English society. As 
every freeman was his own judge and his own legislator, so he was his 
own house priest; and the common Enghsh worship lay in the sacrifice 
which he offered to the god of his hearth. 

From Sleswick and the shores of the Northern Sea we must pass, 
before opening our story, to a land which, dear as it is now to English- 
men, had not as yet been trodden by Enghsh feet. The island of 
Britain had for nearly four hundred years been a province of the 
Empire. A descent of Julius Caesar revealed it (B.C. 54) to the Roman 
world, but nearly a century, elapsed before the Emperor Claudius 
attempted its definite conquest. The victories of Julius Agricola (a.d. 
78 — 84) carried the Roman frontier to the Friths of Forth and of Clyde, 
and the work of Roman civilization followed hard upon the Roman 
sword. The conquered population was grouped in great cities such 
as York or Lincoln, cities governed by their own municipal officers, 
guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a network of magni- 
ficent roads, which extended from one end of the island to the other. 
Commerce sprang up in ports like that of London ; agriculture 
flourished till Britain became one of the great corn-exporting countries 
of the world ; its mineral resources were explored in the tin mines of 
Cornwall, the lead mines of Somerset, the iron mines of Northumber- 
land and the Forest of Dean. The wealth of the island grew fast 
during centuries of unbroken peace, but the evils which were slowly 
sapping the strength of the Roman Empire at large must have told 
heavily on the real wealth of the province of Britain. Here, as in 
Italy or Gaul, the population probably declined as the estates of the 
landed proprietors grew larger, and the cultivators sank into serfs 
whose cabins clustered round the luxurious villas of their lords. The 
mines, if worked by forced labour, must have been a source of endless 
oppression. Town and country were alike crushed by heavy taxation, 
while industry was checked by a system of trade guilds which con- 
fined each occupation to an hereditary caste. Above all, the purely 
despotic system of the Roman Government, by crushing all local 
mdependence, crushed all local vigoui'. Men forgot how to fight for 
their country when they forgot how to govern it. 

Such causes of decay were common to every province of the Empire ; 
bat there were others that sprang from the peculiar circumstances of 
Britain itself. The island was weakened by a disunion within, which arose 
from the partial character of its civilization. It was only in the tov/ns 
that the conquered Britons became entirely Romanized. The tribes of 
the rural districts seem to have remained apart, speaking their own 
tongue, and owning some traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. 
The use of the Roman language may be taken as marking the progress 
of Roman civilization, and though Latin had wholly superseded the 
language of the conquered peoples in Spain or Gaul, its use seems to 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 
Britain 

AND THE 

English. 



Britain 
and tlie 
Snglish. 



have been confined in Britain to the inhabitants of the towns. It was 
this disunion that was revealed by the peculiar nature of the danger 
which threatened Britain from the North. The Picts were simply 
Britons who had been sheltered from Roman conquest by the fastnesses 
of the Highlands, and who were at last roused in their turn to attack 
by the weakness of the province and the hope of plunder. Their 
invasions penetrated to the heart of the island. Raids so extensive 
could hardly have been effected without help from within, and the dim 
history of the time allows us to see not merely an increase of disunion 
between the Romanized and un-Romanized population of Britaui, 
but even an alliance between the last and their free kinsfolk, the Picts. 
The struggles of Britain, however, lingered on till dangers nearer 
home forced the Empire to recall its legions and leave the province 
to itself Ever since the birth of Christ the countries which lay round 
the Mediterranean Sea, and which then comprehended the whole of 
the civilized world, had rested in peace beneath the rule of Rome. 
During four hundred years its frontier had held at bay the barbarian 
world without — the Parthian of the Euphrates, the Numidian of the 
African desert, the German of the Danube or the Rhine. It was this 
mass of savage barbarism that at last broke in on the Empire at a time 
when its force was sapped by internal decay. In the Western dominions 
of Pome the triumph of the invaders was complete. The Franks 
conquered and colonized Gaul, the West- Goths conquered and colo- 
nized Spain, the Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa, the Burgundians 
encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone, the East- 
Goths ruled at last in Italy itself. 

It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in 41 1 recalled 
her legions from Britatn, and though she purposed to send them 
back again when the danger was over, the moment for their return , 
never came. The province, thus left unaided, seems to have fought 
bravely against its assailants, and once at least to have driven back 
the Picts to their mountains in a rising of despair. But the threat 
of fresh inroads found Britain torn with civil quarrels which made 
a united resistance impossible, while its Pictish enemies strengthened 
themselves by a league with marauders from Ireland (Scots as they 
were then called), whose pirate-boats were harrying the western coast 
of the island, and with a yet more formidable race of pirates who 
had long been pillaging along the British Channel. These were the 
English. We do not know whether it was the pressure of other tribes 
or the example of their German brethren who were now moving in a 
general attack on the Empire from their forest homes, or simply the 
barrenness of their coast, which drove the hunters, farmers, fishermen, 
of the three English tribes to sea. But the daring spirit of their race 
already broke out in the secresy and suddenness of their swoop, in the 
fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 



either sword or oar. ^' Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time, 
" fierce beyond other foes, and cunning as they are fierce : the sea is 
their school of war, and the storm their friend ; they are sea-wolves 
that live on the pillage of the world." To meet the league of Pict, 
Scot, and Englishman by the forces of the province itself became im- 
possible; and the one course left was to imitate the fatal policy by 
which the Empire had invited its own doom while striving to avert it, 
the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. The rulers of 
Britain resolved to break the league by detaching the English from it, 
and to use their new allies against the Pict. By the usual promises 
of land and pay, a band of English warriors were drawn for this 
purpose in 449 from Jutland, with their chiefs, Hengest and Horsa, 
at their head. 



Sec II. 

The 
English 
Conquest. 

44.9- 

607. 



Section II.— The Eng:lish Conquest, 4.4-9—607. 

[Authorities for the Conquest of Britain. — The only extant British account is 
that of the monk Gildas^ diffuse and inflated, but valuable as the one authority 
lor the state of the island at the time, and as giving, in the conclusion of his 
work, the native story of the conquest of Kent. I have examined his 
general character, and the objections to his authenticity, &c., in two papers 
in the Saturday Reviroj for April 24 and May 8, 1869. The conquest of Kent 
is the only one of which we have any record from the side of the conquered. 
The English conquerors have left brief jottings of the conquest of Kent, 
Sussex, and Wessex, in the curious annals which form the opening of the 
compilation now known as the "English Chronicle." They are undoubtedly 
historic, though with a slight mythical intemiixture. We possess no materials 
for the liistory of the English in their invasion of Mid-Britain or Mercia, and a 
fragment of the annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation 
which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light upon their actions in 
the North. Dr. Guest's papers in the * ' Transactions of the Arch^ological 
Institute" are the best modern narratives of the conquest.] 



It is with the landing of Hengest and his war-band at Ebbsfleet on 
the shores of the Isle of Thanet that English history begins. No 
spot in Britain can be so sacred to Englishmen as that which first felt 
the tread of English feet. There is little indeed to catch the eye in 
Ebbsfleet itself, a mere lift of higher ground with a few grey cottages 
dotted over it, cut off now-a-days from the sea by a reclaimed meadow 
and a sea-wall. But taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty 
of its own. To the right the white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks 
down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay ; far away to the left, across 
grey marsh levels, where smoke-wreaths mark the sites of Rich- 
borough and Sandwdch, rises the dim cliff-line of Deal. Ever3lhiEg 
in the character of the spot confirms the national tradition whic h fixed 
here the first landing-place of our Enghsh fathers, for great as the 



Tuaaet. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. II. 

The 

English 

conqltest. 

4.4.©- 

60'7. 



The 
Bnirlish 
Attack. 



physical changes of the country have been since the fifth century, they 
have told little on its main features. It is easy to discover in the 
misty level of the present Minster Marsh what was once a broad 
inlet of sea parting Thanet from the mainland of Britain, through 
which the pirate-boats of the first Englishmen came saihng with a fair 
wind to the little gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet ; and Richborough, a fortress 
whose broken ramparts still rise above the grey flats which have 
taken the place of this older sea-channel, was the common landing- 
place of travellers from Gaul. If the war-ships of the English pirates 
therefore were cruising off the coast at the moment when the bargain 
with the Britons was concluded, their disembarkation at Ebbsfleet 
almost beneath the walls of Richborough would be natural enough. 
But the after-current of events serves to show that the choice of this 
landing-place was the result of a deliberate design. Between the 
Briton and his hireling soldiers there could be little mutual confidence. 
Quarters in Thanet would satisfy the followers of Hengest, who still 
lay in sight of their fellow-pirates in the Channel, and who felt them- 
selves secured against the treachery which had so often proved fatal 
to the barbarian by the broad inlet which parted their camp from the 
mainland. Nor was the choice less satisfactory to the provincial, 
trembling — and, as the event proved, justly trembling — lest in his zeal 
against the Pict he had introduced an even fiercer foe into Britain. 
His dangerous allies were cooped up in a corner of the land, and 
parted from it by a sea-channel which was guarded by the strongest 
fortresses of the coast. 

The need of such precautions was soon seen in the disputes which 
arose as soon as the work for which the mercenaries had been hired was 
done. The Picts were hardly scattered to the winds in a great battle 
when danger came from the English themselves. Their numbers 
rapidly increased as the news of the settlement spread among the 
pirates of the Channel, and with the increase of their number increased 
the difficulty of supplying rations and pay. The long dispute which 
rose over these questions was at last closed by the Enghsh with a 
threat of war. The threat, however, as we have seen, was no easy one 
to carry out. When the English chieftains gave their voice for war, 
in 449, the inlet between Thanet and the mainland, traversable only 
at low water by a long and dangerous ford, and guarded at either 
mouth by the fortresses of Richborough and Reculver, stretched right 
across their path. The channels of the Medway and the Cray, with 
the great circle of the Weald, furnished further lines of defence in the 
rear, while around lay a population of soldiers, the military colonists of 
the coast, pledged by terms of feudal service to guard the shore against 
the barbarian. Great, however, as these difficulties were, they yielded 
before the suddenness of Hengesf s onset. The harbour seems to have 
been crossed, the coast-road to London seized, before any force could be 



1.1 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 



collected to oppose the English ; and it was only when they passed the 
vast potteries whose refuse still strews the mudbanks of the Medway that 
they found the river passage secured. The guarded walls of Rochester 
probably forced them to turn southwards along the ridge of low hills 
which forms the bound of its river-valley. Their march led them 
through a district full of memories of a past which had even then 
faded from the minds of men ; for hill and hill-slope were the 
necropolis of a vanished race, and scattered among the boulders 
that strewed the ground rose the cromlechs and huge barrows of 
the dead. One such mighty relic survives in the monument now 
called Kits' Coty House, the close as it seems of a great sepulchral 
avenue which linked the graves around it with the grave-ground of 
Addington. The view of their first battle-field broke on the English 
warriors from a steep knoll on which the grey weather-beaten stones 
of this monument are reared, and a lane which still leads down from 
it through peaceful homesteads guided them across the river-valley 
to a little village named Aylesford, which marked the ford across the 
Medway. The chronicle of the conquest tells nothing of the rush 
that must have carried the ford, or of the fight that went struggling 
up through the village. It tells only that Horsa fell in the moment 
of victory; and the flint-heap of Horsted, which has long preserved 
his name, and was held in after time to mark his grave, is thus the 
earliest of those monuments of English valour of which Westminster 
is the last and noblest shrine. 

The victory of Aylesford did more than give East Kent to the 
English ; it struck the key-note of the whole English conquest of 
Britain. The massacre which followed the battle indicated at once 
the merciless nature of the struggle which had begun. While the 
wealthier Kentish landowners fled in panic over sea, the poorer Britons 
took refuge in hill and forest till hunger drove them from their lurking- 
places to be cut down or enslaved by their conquerors. It was in vain 
that some sought shelter within the walls of their churches : for the 
rage of the English seems to have burned fiercest against the clergy. 
The priests were slain at the altar, the churches fired, the peasants 
driven by the flames to fling themselves on a ring of pitiless steel. It 
is a picture such as this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain 
from that of the other provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul 
by the Frank, or of Italy by the Lombard, proved little more than a 
forcible settlement of the one conqueror or the other among tributary 
subjects who were destined in a long course of ages to absorb their 
conquerors. French is the tongue not of the Frank but of the Gaul 
whom he overcame ; and the fair hair of the Lombard is nov/ all but 
unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest was a sheer dispos- 
session and slaughter of the people whom the English conquered. In 
ail the world-wide struggle between Rome and the German invaders 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Skc. II. 

The 

English 

Conquest. 

4.49- 

607, 



^3^ 



The Con- 
qtiest of 

Bonthem 
Britain. 



no land was so stubbornly fought for or so hardly won. The conquest 
of Britain was indeed only partly wrought out after two centuries of 
bitter warfare. But it was just through the long and merciless 
nature of the struggle that of all the German conquests this proved 
the most thorough and complete. At its close Britain had become Eng- 
land, a land that is, not of Britons, but of Englishmen. It is pos- 
sible that a few of the vanquished people may have lingered as slaves 
round the homesteads of their English conquerors, and a few of 
their household words (if these were not brought in at a later time) 
mingled oddly with the English tongue. But doubtful exceptions 
such as these leave the main facts untouched. When the steady pro- 
gress of English conquest was stayed for a while by civil wars of a 
century and a half after Aylesford, the Briton had disappeared from 
the greater part of the land which had been his own, and the tongue, 
the religion, the laws of his English conqueror reigned without a 
rival from Essex to the Severn, and from the British Channel to the 
Firth of Forth. \ 

Aylesford, however, was but the first step in this career of conquest. 
How stubborn the contest was may be seen from the fact that it took 
sixty years to complete the conquest of Southern Britain alone. Kent 
passed slowly under the rule of Hengest. After a second defeat at the 
passage of the Cray, the Britons "forsook Kent-land and fled with 
much fear to London ;" and, six years after Aylesford, the castles of 
the shore, Richborough, Dover, and Lymne, fell at last into English 
hands. But the greed of plunder drew fresh war-bands from the 
German coast. New invaders, drawn from among the Saxons, the 
southern tribe of the English confederacy, were seen in 477, some twenty 
years later, pushing slowly along the strip of land which lay westward 
of Kent between the Weald and the sea. Nowhere has the physical 
aspect of the country been more utterly changed. The vast sheet of 
scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the Andreds- 
wold stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of 
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the 
Thames, and leaving only a thin strip of coast along its southern edge. 
This coast was guarded by a great fortress, which occupied the spot 
now called P evens ey, the future landing-place of the Norman Con-^ 
queror. The fall of this fortress of Anderida in 491 established the 
kingdom of the South-Saxons ; "^lle and Cissa," ran the pitiless record 
of the conquerors, "beset Anderida, and slew all that were therein, 
nor was there afterwards one Briton left." But the followers of Hen- 
gest or of ^lla had touched little more than the coast ; and the true 
conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of Saxons, 
who struggled under Cerdic and Cymric up from Southampton Water 
in 495 to the great downs where Winchester offered so rich a prize. 
Five thousand Britons fell in a fight which ope^ied the country to 



10 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607—1013. 



these invaders, and a fresh victory at Charford in 519 set the crown 
of the West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. 

We know little of the incidents of these conquests ; nor do we 
know why at this juncture they seem to have been suddenly inter- 
rupted. But it is certain that a victory of the Britons at Mount Badon 
in the year 520 not only checked the progress of the West-Saxons, 
but was followed by a genera] pause in the English advance. For 
nearly half a century the great belt of woodland vv^hich then curv^ed 
round from Dorset to the valley of the Thames seems to have barred the 
way of the assailants. From London to the Firth of Forth, from the 
Fens to St. David's Head, the country still remained unconquered, 
and there was little in the long breathing-space to herald that second 
outbreak of the English race which really made Britain England. In 
the silence of this interval of rest we listen to the monotonous plaint of 
Gildas, the one writer whom Britain has left us, with a strange disap- 
pointment. Gildas had seen the EngUsh invasion, and it is to him 
we owe our knowledge of the English Conquest of Kent. But we look 
in vain to his book for any account of the life or settlement of the 
English conquerors. Across the border of the new England that was 
growing up along the southern shores of Britain, Gildas gives us but^ 
glimpse — doubtless he had but a glimpse himself — of forsaken walls, 
of shrines polluted by heathen impiety. His silence and his igno- 
rance mark the character of the struggle. No British neck had as yet 
bowed before the English invader, no British pen was to record his 
conquest. A century after their landing the English are still known 
to their British foes only as "barbarians," "wolves," "dogs," "whelps 
from the kennel of barbarism," " hateful to God and man." Their 
victories seemed victories of the powers of evil, chastisements of a divine 
justice for national sin. Their ravage, terrible as it had been, was held 
to be almost at an end : in another century — so ran old prophecies — 
their last hold on the land would be shaken off. But of submission to, 
or even of intercourse with the strangers, there is not a word. Gildas 
tells us nothing of their fortunes, or of their leaders. 

In spite of his silence, however, we may still know something of the 
way in which the new English society grew up in the conquered country, 
for the extermination of the Briton was but the prelude to the settle- 
ment of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new England 
is, that it \vas the one purely German nation that rose upon the 
wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain, or Gaul, or Italy, though 
they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, 
administrative order, still remained Roman. In Britain alone Rome 
died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of 
government and society disappeared with the people who used it. 
The villas, the mosaics, the coins which we dig up in our fields are 
no relics of our "^.nglish fathers, but of a Roman world which our 



Sec. II. 

The 

English 
Conquest. 

607. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



Sec. II. 

Engosh 
Conquest. 

607. 



England 

and 
the Con- 
quest. 



fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its manners, 
its faith, went with it. The new England was a heathen country. The 
religion of Woden and Thunder triumphed over the religion of Cnrist 
Alone among the German assailants of Rome, the English rejected the 
faith of the Empire they helped to overthrow. Elsewhere the Chris- 
tian priesthood served as mediators between the barbarian and the 
conquered. Here the rage of the conquerors burnt fiercest against 
the clergy. River and homestead and boundary, the very days of the 
week, bore the names of the new gods who displaced Christ. But \{ 
England seemed for the moment a waste from which all the civilization 
of the world had fled away, it contained within itself the germs of a 
nobler life than that which had been destroyed. The base of the new 
English society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, 
or sacrificing for himself in his far-off fatherland by the Northern 
Sea. However roughly he dealt while the struggle went on with the 
material civilization of Britain, it was impossible that such a man could 
be a mere destroyer. War was no sooner over than the warrior settled 
down into the farmer, and the ho. tie of the peasant churl rose beside 
the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked the site of the villa he 
had burnt. The Enghsh kinsfolk settled in groups over the conquered 
country, as the lot fell to each, no longer kinsfolk only but dwellers in 
the same plot, knit together by their common holding within the same 
bounds. Each little village-commonwealth lived the same life in 
Britain as its farmers had lived at home. Each had its moot hill 
or sacred tree as a centre, its " mark " as a border ; each judged by 
witness of the kinsfolk and made laws in the assembly of its wise men, 
and chose its own leaders among the " eorls ^' for peace or war. 

In two ways only was this primitive organization of English society 
affected by its transfer to the soil of Britain. War begat the King. 
It is probable that the Enghsh had hitherto known nothing of 
kings in their own fatherland, where each small tribe lived under the 
rule of its own chosen Ealdorman. But in a war such as that which 
they waged against the Britons it was necessary to find a common 
leader whom the various tribes engaged in conquering Kent or Wessex 
might follow, and such a leader soon rose into a higher position than 
that of a temporary chief The sons of Hengest became kings in Kent, 
those of ^Ua in Sussex. The West-Saxons have left a record of the 
solemn election by which they chose Cerdic for their khig. Such a 
choice at once drew the various villages and tribes of each community 
closer together than of old, while the usage which gc^^ all unoccupied 
or common ground to the new ruler enabled him td n-ound himself 
with a chosen war-band of companions, servants, or " thegns " as they 
were called, who were rewarded for their service by gifts from it, and 
who at last became a nobility which superseded the " eorlas " of the 
original English constitution. And as war begat the King and the 



L] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607— 10J3. 



military noble, so it all but begat the slave. There had always been 1 
a slave class, a class of the unfree, among the English as among j 
all German peoples ; but the numbers of this class, if unaffected 
by the conquest of Britain, were swelled by the wars which soon 
sprang up among the English conquerors. No rank saved the 
prisoner taken in battle from the doom of slavery, and slavery 
itself was often welcomed as saving the prisoner from death. We^ 
see this in the story of a noble warrior who had fallen wounded in 
a fight between two English tribes, and was carried as a bond-slave 
to the house of a thegn hard by. He declared himself a peasant, 
but his master penetrated the disguise. " You deserve death," he 
said, " since all my brothers and kinsfolk fell in the fight/' but for 
his oath's sake he spared his life and sold him to a Frisian at London. 
The Frisian was probably a merchant, such as those who were carry- 
ing English captives at that time to the market-place of Rome. But 
war was not the only cause of the increase of this slave class. The 
number of the " unfree " were swelled by debt and crime. Famine 
drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat ; " the debtor 
unable to discharge his debt flung on the ground the freeman's sword 
and spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a 
slave within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not 
make up his fine became the crime- serf of the plaintiff or the king. 
Sometimes a father, pressed by need, sold children and wife into 
bondage. The slave became part of the live-stock of the estate, to be 
willed away at death with the horse or the ass, whose pedigree was 
kept as carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like 
himself; even the freeman's children by a slave- mother inherited the 
mother's taint. " Mine is the calf that is born of my cow," ran the 
English proverb. The cabins of the unfree clustered round the home 
of the freeman as they had clustered round the villa of the Roman 
gentleman ; ploughman, shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and 
cowherd, dairymaid, barnman, sower, hay ward and woodward, were 
alike serfs. It was not such a slavery as that we have known in 
modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare ; if the slave were slain, 
it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his lord could slay him 
if he would ; it was but a chattel the less. The slave had no place in 
the justice-court, no kinsman to claim vengeance for the wrong. If a 
stranger slew him, his lord claimed the damages ; if guilty of wrong- 
doing, " his skin paid for him " under the lash. If he fled he might be 
chased like a strayed beast, and flogged to death for his crime, or burned 
to death if th^ ^e were a woman. 

The he^l't o^ --^c English conquerors after the battle of Mount Badon 
v:as no vc^y long one, for even while Gildas was writing, the Britons 
sf^eni to have been driven from the eastern coast by a series of descents 
whose history is lost. The invaders who thus became masters of the 



Sec. IL 

The 
English 

Conquest 

607. 



14 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Shc. IL 

The 

English 

Conquest. 

449- 

607. 



Con- 
eraest of 

Mid- 
Britain 
and the 
North. 



wolds of Lincoliishirejandof the great district which was cut off from the 
rest of Britain by the Wash and the Fens, were drawn from that tribe 
of the English confederacy which, as we have seen, bore especially the 
name of Englishmen, as those of South Britain had been drawn from 
its Saxon tribe, and those of Kent from its Jutish. On the Wolds they 
were known as Lindiswaras, in the Fens as Gyrwas ; on the coast as 
North-folk and South-folk, names still preserved to us in the counties 
where they settled. The district round London, on the other hand, 
was won and colonized by men of Saxon blood — the Middle-Sexe and 
East-Sexe or Essex. It may have been the success of these landings 
on the eastern coast that roused the West-Saxons of the southern coast 
to a new advance. Their capture of the hill-fort of Old Sarum in 552 
threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire Downs ; and pushing along 
the upper valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill, they swooped 
at last from their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. 
Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their 
British kings to resist this onset, became the spoil of an English 
victory at Deorham in 577, and the line of the great western river lay 
open to the arms of the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated 
to the borders of Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin, 
recently brought again to light, went up in flames. A British poet 
sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, " the white town in the 
valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green woodland, 
the hall of its chieftain left " without fire, without hght, without songs," 
the silence broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who " has 
swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair." The raid, 
however, was repulsed ; and the West-Saxons, who seem to have been 
turned to the east by the difficulty of forcing the fastnesses of the 
forest of Arden, penetrated into the valley of the Thames. A march 
of their King CuthwulPs made them masters in 571 of the districts 
which now form Oxfordshire and Berkshire ; and their advance along 
the river upon London promised them the foremost place among the 
conquerors of Britain. But though Wessex was fated in the end to win 
overlordship over every English people, its time had not come yet ; 
and the leadership of the English race was to fall for nearly a century 
into the hands of a tribe of invaders whose fortunes we have now 
to follow. 

Rivers were the natural inlets by which the Northern pirates every- 
where m.ade their way into the heart of Europe. In Britain the fortress 
of London barred their way ./ ./_ .... i. r.wues Irom its moulh, a- 
drove them, as we have seen, to an advance along the ?outhem co^ 
and over the downs of Vv^ltshire, before reachmg ^^' - - '• 
But the rivers which united in the estuary of the 
open highways into the heajt of i^ritain, and it ^-p^^ 
the great mass of the invaders penetrated uiio tiic mtcnui Oa tiav 



d 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 607— 1013. 



island. Like the invaders of the eastern coast, they were of the 
English tribe from Sleswick. One body, turned southward by the forest 
of Elmet, which covered the district around Leeds, followed the course 
of the Trent. Those who occupied the wooded countiy between the 
Trent and the Humber took, from their position, the name of Southum- ' 
brians. A second division, advancing along the curve of the former \ 
river, and creeping down the line of its tributary, the Soar, till they 
reached Leicester, became known as the Middle-English. The head 
waters of the Trent were the seat of those invaders who penetrated 
furthest to the west, and camped round Lichfield and Repton. This 
country became the border-land between Englishmen and Britons, 
and the settlers bore the name of '' Mercians,'^ men, that is, of the 
March or border. We know hardly anything of this conquest of 
Mid-Britain, and little more of the conquest of the North. Under the 
Romans political power had centred in the vast district between 
the Humber and the Forth. York had been the capital of Britain 
and the seat of the Roman prefect : and the bulk of the garrison 
maintained in the island lay cantoned along the Roman wall. Signs 
of wealth and prosperity appeared everywhere ; cities rose beneath 
the shelter of the Roman camps ; villas of British landowners studded 
the vale of the Ouse and the far-off uplands of the Tweed, where the 
shepherd trusted for security against Pictish marauders to the terror 
of the Roman name. This district was assailed at once from the 
north and from the south. A part of the invading force which 
entered the Humber marched over the Yorkshire wolds to found a 
kingdom, which was known as that of the Deiri, in the fens of Holder- 
ness and on the chalk downs westward of York. Ida and the men 
of fifty keels which followed him reared, in 547, the capital of a more 
northerly kingdom, that of Bernicia, on the rock of Bamborough, and 
won their way slowly along the coast against a stubborn resistance 
which formed the theme of British songs. 

Strife between these two kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia long 
hindered the full conquest of Northern Britain. They were at last 
united under .-Ethelfrith, a king of greater vigour than any we have 
seen yet in English history, and from their union was formed a new 
kingdom, the kingdom of Northumbria. Under ^thelfrith the work of 
conquest went on with wonderful rapidity. In 603 the forces of the 
Northern Britons were annihilated in a great battle at Daegsastan, 
and the rule of Northumbria estabhshed from the Humber to the 
Forth. Along' the west of Britain there stretched the unconquered 
kingdoms of Strathclyde and Cumbria, which extended from the river 
Clyde to the Dee, and the smaller British states which occupied what 
we now call Wales. Chester formed the link between these two bodies : 
and it was Chester that ^thelfrith chose in 607 for his next point of 
attack. Hard by the city two thousand monks were gathered in the 



i6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 

Kingdom. 
607- 
685. 

607. 



iSthel- 
bert. 



monastery of Bangor, and after imploring in a three days' fast the help 
of Heaven for their country, a crowd of these ascetics followed the 
British army to the field, i^thelfrith watered the wild gestures and 
outstretched arms of the strange company as it stood apart, intent upon 
prayer, and took the monks for enchanters. " Bear they arms or no," 
said the king, " they war against us when they cry against us to their 
God,'' and in the surprise and rout which followed the monks were the 
first to fall. 



Section III.— The Nortlmznbrian Kingdom, 607— 6S5. 

{^Authorities. — Bgeda's ** Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum " is the one 
primary authority for this period. I have spoken fully of it and its writer in 
the text. The meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the West-Saxons have 
been brought by copious insertions from Baeda to the shape in which they at 
present appear in the ** English Chronicle." The Poem of Csedmon has been 
published by Mr. Thorpe, and copious summaries of it are given by Sharon 
Turner (**Hist. of Anglo-Saxons," vol. iii. cap. 3) and Mr. Morley (** English 
Writers, " vol. i.) The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, and those of Cuthbert by 
Bseda and an earlier contemporary biographer, which are appended to 
Mr. Stevenson's edition of the ** Historia Ecclesiastica," throw great light on 
the rehgious condition of the North. For Guthlac of Crowland, see the "Acta 
Sanctorum " for April xi. For Theodore, and the English Church which he 
organized, see Kemble ("Saxons in England," vol. ii. cap. 8 — 10), and above 
all the invaluable remarks of Professor Stubbs in his Constitutional History.] 



The British kingdoms were now utterly parted from one another. 
By their victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons 
of Devon and Cornwall from the general body of their race. By his 
victory at Chester and the reduction of Lancashire which followed it, 
^thelfrith broke this body again into two several parts. From this 
time, therefore, the character of the English conquest of Britain changes. 
It dies down into a warfare against the separate British provinces — 
West Wales, North Wales, and Cumbria, as they were called — which^ 
though often interrupted, at last found its close in the victories of 
Edward the First. A far more important change was that which was 
seen in the attitude of the English conquerors from this time towards 
each other. Freed from the common pressure of the war against the 
Britons, their energies turned to combats with one another, to a long 
struggle for overlordship which was to end in bringing about a real 
national unity. In this struggle the lead was at once taken by 
North umbria, which succeeded under ^thelfrith in establishing its 
overlordship, or claim to military supremacy and tribute, over the 
English tribes who were occupying Mid-Britain, the Southumbrians, 
Middle-English, and Mercians ; and probably over the Lindiswaras 
of Lincolnshire. But a powerful rival appeared at this moment 



dl 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



17 



in Kent. The kingdom of the Jutes rose suddenly into greatness 
under a king called ^thelberht, who established his supremacy over 
the Saxons of Middlesex and Essex, as well as over the English of 
East-Anglia as far north as the Wash ; and drove back the West- 
Saxons, when, after an interval of civil feuds, they began again their 
advance along the Thames, and marched upon London. 

The inevitable struggle between Kent and Northumbria was averted 
by the sudden death of ^thelfrith. Marching in 617 against Raedwald, 
king of East-Anglia, who had sheltered Eadwine, an exile from the 
Northumbrian kingdom, he perished in a defeat at the river Idle. 
yEthelberht, on the other hand, shewed less zeal for the widening of 
his overlordship than for a renewal of that intercourse of Britain with 
the Continent which had been broken off by the conquests of the 
English. His marriage with Bercta, the daughter of the Frankish 
king Charibert of Paris, created a fresh tie between Kent and Gaul, 
But the union had far more important results than those of which 
^thelberht may have dreamed. Bercta, like her Frankish kinsfolk, 
was a Christian. A Christian bishop accompanied her from Gaul 
to Canterbury, the royal city of the kingdom of Kent ; and a ruined 
Christian church, the Church of St. Martin, was given them for 
their worship. The marriage of Bercta was an opportunity which 
was at once seized by the bishop w^ho at this time occupied the 
Koman See, and who is justly known as Gregory the Great. 
Years ago, when but a young deacon, Gregory had noted the white 
bodies, the fair faces, the golden hair of some youths who stood 
bound in the market-place of Rome. " From what country do these 
slaves come ? " he asked the traders who brought them. " They 
are English, Angles ! " the slave-dealers answered. The deacon's pity 
veiled itself in poetic humour. ^' Not Angles, but angels," he said, 
" with faces so angel-like ! From what country come they 1 ^ " They 
come,'' said the merchants, ^' from Deira." " De ira ! " was the un- 
translateable reply ; "aye, plucked from God's ire, and called to Christ's 
mercy ! And what is the name of their king ? " " ^lla," they told 
him ; and Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. " AJle-luia 
shall be sung there," he cried, and passed on, musing how the angel- 
faces should be brought to sing it. Years went by, and the deacon 
had become Bishop of Rome, when Bercta's marriage gave him the 
opening he sought. He at once sent a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the 
head of a band of monks, to preach the Gospel to the English people. 
The missionaries landed in 597 on the very spot where Hengest had 
landed more than a century before in the Isle of Thanet ; and the king 
received them sitting in the open air, on the chalk-down above 
Minster, where the eye now-a-days catches miles away over the 
marshes the dim tower of Canterbury. He listened to the long sermon 
as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him from Gaul 

C 



The 

Northum- 
brian 
Kingdom 

607- 
685. 

Iiandin^ 
of Au^us- 



liS 



HISTORY 01^ THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



Sec. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 
Kingdom. 

607- 
685. 



Reunion 

of £ng. 

land and 

the 
Western 
World. 



Badwine. 



translated it. " Your words are fair," ^thelberht replied at last, with 
English good sense, " but they are new and of doubtful meaning ; " 
for himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but 
he promised shelter and protection to the strangers. The band of 
monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a 
picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of 
their Church. " Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, " Thine 
anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned.^* 
And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older 
Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic 
earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market- 
place, " Alleluia 1 '' 

It is strange that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest 
should be yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the 
second landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure the reversal and 
undoing of the first. " Strangers from Rome " was the title with which 
the missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the 
monks as they chaunted their solemn litany was, in one sense, the return 
of the Rom.an legions who had retired at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It 
was to the tongue and the thought, not of Gregory only, but of such 
men as his English fathers had slaughtered and driven over sea, thai 
i^thelberht listened in the preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the 
earliest royal city of German England, became the centre of Latin in- 
fluence. The Latin tongue became again one of the tongues of Britain, 
the language of its worship, its correspondence, its literature. If poetry 
began at a later day in the English epic of Caedmon, prose took its 
first shape in the Latin history of Baeda. But more than the tongue of 
Rome returned with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed the 
union with the Western world which that of Hengest had destroyed. 
The new England was admitted into the older commonwealth of 
nations. The civilization, art, letters, which had fled before the sword 
of the English Conquest, returned with the Christian faith. The great 
fabric of the Roman law, indeed, never took root in England, but it is 
impossible not to recognize the result of the influence of the Roman 
missionaries in the fact that the codes of customary English law began 
to be put into writing soon after their arrival. 

As yet these great results were still distant ; a year passed before 
even JEthelberht yielded, but from the moment of his conversion the 
new faith advanced rapidly. The Kentish men crowded to baptism in 
the Swale ; the under-kings of Essex and East-Anglia received the 
creed of their overlord. A daughter of the Kentish king carried with 
her the missionary Paulinus to the Northumbrian court. North- 
umbria was now fast rising to a power which set all rivalry at 
defiance. Eadwine, whom we have seen in exile at Raedwald's 
court, mounted the Northumbrian throne on the fall of his enemy, 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



^thelfrith, in 617; and asserted, like his predecessor, his lordship | 
over the English of Mid-Britain. The submission of the East- 1 
Anglians and the East-Saxons after ^thelberht's death destroyed' 
all dread of opposition from Kent; and the Enghsh conquerors of! 
the south, the people of the West-Saxons, alone remained independ- f 
ent. But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken the power of the 
West-Saxons when the Northumbrians attacked them. A story pre- 
served by Baeda tells something of the fierceness of the struggle which 
ended in the subjection of the south to the overlordship of Northumbria. 
Eadvvine gave audience in an Easter-court, which he held in his royal 
city by the river Derwent, to Eumer, an envoy of Wessex, who brought 
a message from its king. In the midst of the conference the envoy 
started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and rushed madly on 
the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king^s war-band, threw 
himself between Eadvvine and his assassin ; but so furious w^as the 
stroke, that even through Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim. 
The king, however, recovered from his wound to march on the West- 
Saxons ; he slew and subdued all who had conspired against him, and 
returned victorious to his own country. The greatness of Northumbria 
now reached its height. Within his own dominions, Eadwine dis- ! 
played a genius for civil government which shows how completely the 
mere age of conquest had passed away. With him began the English ! 
proverb so often applied to after kings : "A woman with her babe I 
might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine's day/' Peaceful ; 
communication revived along the deserted highways ; the springs by 
the roadside were marked with stakes, and a cup of brass set beside 
each for the traveller's refreshment. Some faint traditions of the Roman 
past may have flung their glory round this new " Empire of the 
English •/' some of its majesty had, at any rate, come back with its 
long-lost peace. A royal standard of purple and gold floated before 
Eadwine as he rode through the villages ; a feather-tuft attached to a 
speaj , the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the streets. 
The Northumbrian king was in fact supreme over Britain as no king 
of English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached the 
Forth, and was guarded by a city which bore his name, Edinburgh, 
Eadwine's burgh, the city of Eadwine. Westward, he was master of 
Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles of Anglesey 
and Man. South of the H umber he was owned as o^^erlord by the 
whole English race, save Kent : and Kent bound itself to him by 
giving him its king's daughter as a wife, a step which probably marked 
political subordination. 

With the Kentish queen came Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, 
whose tall stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling 
round a thin worn face, were long remembered in the North ; and the 
wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on the new faith tc ' 

C 2 



19 



Sec. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 
Kingdom 

607- 
685. 



Conver- 
sion of 
Northnnk' 
bria. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 

Kingdom. 
S07- 
685. 



Tlie 
Heathen 
Struggle, 



633. 



which Paialimis and his queen soon converted Eadwine. To finer 
minds its charm lay in the light it threw on the darkness which en- 
compassed men^s lives, the darkness of the future as of the past. " So 
seems the life of man, O king/' burst forth an aged Ealdorman, '^ as 
a sparrow's flight through the hall when you are sitting at meat in 
winter-tide, with the warm fire lighted on the hearth, but the icy rain- 
storm without. The sparrow flies in at one door, and tarries for a 
moment in the light and heat of the hearth-fire, and then fiying forth 
from the other vanishes into the wintry darkness whence it came. So 
tarries for a moment the life of man in our sight, but what is before it, 
what after it, we know not. If this new teaching tells us aught certainly 
of these, let us follow it." Coarser argument told on the crowd. "None 
of your people, Eadv/ine, have worshipped the gods more busily than 
I," said Coifi the priest, "yet there are many more favoured and more 
fortunate. Were these gods good for anything they would help their 
worshippers.'' Then leaping on horseback, he hurled his spear into 
the sacred temple which gave its name to Godmanham on the 
Derwent, and with the rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the 
king. 

But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a 
struggle. Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with 
the death of ^thelberht. Rsedwald of East-Anglia resolved to serve 
Christ and the older gods together : and a pagan and Christian altar 
fronted one another in the same royal temple. The young kings of 
the E?st-Saxons burst into the church where Mellitus, the Bishop 
of London, was administering the Eucharist to the people, crying, 
" Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba," and on the 
bishop's refusal, drove him from their realm. The tide of reaction was 
checked for a time by Eadwine's conversion ; until Mercia sprang into 
a sudden greatness as the champion of the heathen gods. Under 
iEthelfrith and Eadwine Mercia had submitted to the lordship of 
Northumbria ; but its king, Penda, saw in the rally of the old religion 
a chance of winning back its independence. Alone, however, he was 
as yet no match for Northumbria. But the war of the English people 
with the Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a 
season, and Penda boldly broke through the barrier which had parted 
the two races till now, and allied himself with the Welsh king, 
Cadwallon, in an attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at 
Hatfield, and in the light which followed Eadwine was defeated and 
slain. The victory was at once turned to profit by the ambition of 
Penda, while Northumbria was torn with the strifes which followed 
Eadwine's fall. Penda united to his own Mercians of the Upper 
Trent the Middle English of Leicester, the Southumbrians, and the 
Lindiswaras : and was soon strong enough to tear from the West- 
Saxons their possessions along the Severn. So thoroughly was the 



1.1 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



union of these provinces effected, that though some v/ere detached for 
a time after Penda's death, the name of Mercia from this moment 
must be generally taken as covering the whole of them. But his 
work in Middle England gave Northumbria time to rise again under 
a new king, Oswald. The Welsh had remained encamped in the 
heart of the North, and Oswald's first fight was v/ith Cadwallon. A 
small Northumbrian force gathered in 635 under their new king near the 
Roman Wall, and set up the Cross as their standard. Oswald held it 
with his own hands till the hollow in which it was to stand was filled in 
by his soldiers ; then throwing himself on his knees, he cried to 
his army to pray to the living God. Cadwallon fell fighting on the 
" Heaven's Field," as after times called the field of battle, and for 
nine years the power of Oswald equalled that of ^thelfrith and 
Eadwine. 

It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this 
struggle for the Cross. Paulinus had fled from Northumbria at 
Eadwine's fall ; and the Roman Church in Kent shrank into inactivity 
before the heathen reaction. Its place in the conversion of England 
was taken by missionaries from Ireland. To understand, however, 
the true meaning of the change, we must remember that before the 
landing of the English in Britain, the Christian Church comprised 
every country, save Germany, in Western Europe, as far as Ireland 
itself. The conquest of Britain by the pagan English thrust a 
wedge of heathendom into the heart of this great communion, and 
broke it into two unequal parts. On the one side lay Italy, Spain, 
and Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to the See of Rome, on 
the otKer the Church of Ireland. But the condition of the two portion^ 
of Western Christendom was very different. While the vigour of Chris- 
tianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare struggle 
for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders, drew from 
its conversion an energy such as it has never known since. Chris- 
tianity had been received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, 
and letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and 
Biblical knowledge which fled from the Continent took refuge in 
famous schools which made Durrow and Armagh the universities of 
the West. The new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook 
confinement within the bounds of Ireland itself. Patrick, the first 
missionary of the island, had not been half a century dead when 
Irish Christianity flung itself with a fiery zeal into battle with the 
mass of heathenism which was rolling in upon the Christian world. 
Irish missionaries laboured among the Picts of the Highlands and 
among the Frisians of the northern seas. An Irish missionary, 
Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the Apennines. 
The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its name another Irish 
missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing over 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



Shc. III. 

Trfs 

Northum- 
brian 

Kingdom. 
607- 

Oswald. 

633-^2. 



the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed as if the 
course of the world's history was to be changed, as if the older Celtic 
race that Roman and German had swept before them had turned to 
the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin 
Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Churches of the 
West. 

It was possibly the progress of the Irish Columban at her very doors 
which roused into new life for a time the energies of Rome, and spurred 
Gregory to attempt the conversion of the EngKsh in Britain. But, as 
we have seen, the ardour of the Roman mission in Kent soon sank 
into reaction ; and again the Church of Ireland came forward to supply 
its place. On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of 
Scotland, another Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mo- 
nastery of lona. Oswald in youth found refuge within its walls, and on 
his accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries 
from among its monks. The first despatched in answer to his call 
obtained little success. He declared on his return that among a people 
so stubborn and barbarous success was impossible. " Was it their 
stubbornness, or your severity x''^ asked Aidan, a brother sitting by ; 
" did you forget God's word to give them the milk first and then the 
meat ? " All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to undertake the 
abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his epis- 
copal see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne. Thence, from the 
monastery which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers 
poured forth over the heathen realms. Chad went to the conversion 
of the Mercians, Boisil guided a little troop of missionaries to Melrose, 
Aidan himself wandered on foot, with the king as his interpreter, 
preaching among the peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. The 
reception of the new faith in the surrounding kingdoms became 
the mark of their submission to Oswald's overlordship. A preacher 
from Gaul, Birinus, had already penetrated into pagan Wessex, and in 
Oswald's presence its king received baptism, and established with his 
assent the see of Southern Britain in the royal city of Dorchester. 
Oswald ruled as wide a realm as his predecessor ; but for after times 
the memory of his greatness was lost in the legends of his piety. 
A new conception of kingship began to blend itself with that of the 
warlike glory of ^tiielfrith, or the wise administration of Eadwine. The 
moral power which was to reach its height in yElfred first dawns in the 
story of Oswald. He wandered, as we have said, as Aidan's interpreter 
in his long mission journeys. *' By reason of his constant habit of 
praying or giving thanks to the Lord, he was wont wherever he sat to 
hold his hands upturned on his kness." As he feasted with Bishop 
Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble of his war-band, v/hom he had 
! set to give alms to the poor at his gate, told him of a m.ultitude that. 
• srill waited fastin^^ without. The king at once bade the untasted meat 



1.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



23 



before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish be divided 
piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed it. 
" May this hand/' he cried, "never grow old ! '' 

Prisoned, however, as it was by the conversion of Wessex to the central 
districts of England, heathendom fought desperately for life. Penda 
was still its rallying point. His long reign in fact was one continuous 
battle with the Cross. We do not know why he looked idly on while 
Oswald reasserted his overlordship over Wessex, but the submission 
of East-Anglia to the Northumbrian rule forced him to a fresh contest. 
East-Anglia had long before become Christian, but the oddly mingled 
religion of its first Christian king, R^dwald, died into mere super- 
stition in his successors. Its present king, Sigebert, left his throne for 
a monastery before the war began, but his people dragged him again 
from his cell on the news of Penda's invasion, in faith that his presence 
would bring them the favour of Heaven. The monk-king was set in 
the fore-front of the battle, but he would bear no weapon but a wand, 
and his fall was followed by the rout of his army and the submission of 
his kingdom to the invader. In 642 Oswald marched to deliver East- 
Anglia from Penda ; but in a battle called the battle of the Maserfeldhe 
was overthrown and slain. His body was mutilated, and its limbs set on 
stakes by the brutal conqueror ; but legend told that when all else of 
Oswald had perished, the " white hand " that Aidan had blest still 
remained white and uncorrupted. For a few years after his victory at 
Maserfeld, Peiida stood supreme in Britain. Wessex owned his over- 
lordship as it had owned that of Oswald, and its king threw off the 
Christian faith and married Penda's sister. Northumbria alone, though 
distracted by civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused 
to yield. Year by year Penda carried his ravages over the north ; once 
he reached even the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of 
Bamborough. Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled down 
the cottages around, and piling their wood against its walls, fired the 
mass in a fair wind that drove the flames on the town. " See, Lord, 
what ill Penda is doing," cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet 
of Fame, as he saw the smoke drifting over the city, and a change of 
wind — so ran the legend of Northumbrians agony — drove back at the 
words the flames on those who kindled them. But in spite of Penda's 
victories, the faith which he had so often struck down revived every- 
where around him. Burnt and harried as it was, Northumbria still 
fought for the Cross. Wessex quietly became Christian again. Penda's 
own son, whom he had set over the Middle-English, received baptism 
and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the new 
faith appeared fearlessly among the Mercians themselves. Heathen 
to the last, Penda stood by urn heeding if any were willing to hear ; 
hating and despising with a certain grand sincerity of nature " those 
whom he saw not doing the works of the faith they had received"! 



Sec. III. 
The 

NORTHUM- 
BRIAK 

Kingdom. 

607- 
685. 

Penda. 



642 



24 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

Thh 
Northum- 
brian 
Kingdom. 

607- 
685. 

655. 



OsTi'-i. 

64? — 670. 



/ 



Northumbrian overlordship again followed in the track of North- 
umbrian missionaries along the eastern coast, and the old man roused 
himself for a last stroke at his foes. Oswi had at length been accepted as 
its sovereign by all Northumbria, and in 655 he met the pagan host in 
the field of Winwced by Leeds. It was in vain that the Northumbrians 
sought to avert Penda^s attack by offers of ornaments and costly gifts. 
" If the pagans will not accept them/^ Oswi cried at last, "let us offer 
them to One that will ;" and he vowed that if successful he would 
dedicate his daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries in his 
realm. Victory at last declared for the faith of Christ. The river 
over which the Mercians fled was swollen with a great rain ; it swept 
away the fragments of the heathen host, and the cause of the older 
gods was lost for ever. 

The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was 

followed by a long and profound peace. For three years after the 

battle of Winwosd Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in 

Oswi's name : and though a general rising of the people threw off 

their yoke, and set Penda^s son Wulfere on its throne, it still owned 

the Northumbrian overlordship. Its heathendom was dead with 

Penda. " Being thus freed," Basda tells us, " the Mercians with their 

king rejoiced to serve the true King, Christ." Its three provinces, 

the earlier Mercia, the Middle-English, and the Lindisvvaras, were 

united in the bishopric of Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield is 

still dedicated. Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and 

lowly in temper that he travelled on foot on his long mission journeys, 

till Archbishop Theodore with his own hands lifted him on horseback. 

The old Celtic poetry breaks out in his death-legend, as it tells us how 

voices of singers singing sweetly descended from heaven to the little 

cell beside St. Mary's Church where the bishop lay dying. Then •'' the 

same song ascended from the roof again, and returned heavenward by 

the way that it came." It was the soul of his brother, the missionary 

Cedd, come with a choir of angels to solace the last hours of Ceadda. 

In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been 

lost in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the 

new religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the 

Lowlands.. It carries us at its outset into northern Northumbria, the 

older Bernicia, the country of the Teviot and the Tweed. Born on 

the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found shelter at eight 

I years old in a widow's house in the little village of Wrangholm. 

1 Already in youth there was a poetic sensibility beneath the robust 

! frame of the boy which caught even in the chance word of a game a 

[ call to higher things. Later on, a traveller coming in his white mantle 

j over the hillside, and stopping his horse to tend Cuthbert's injured 

1 knee, seemed to him an angel. The boy's shepherd hfe carried him to 

1 the bleak upland, still famous as a sheepwalk, though the scant herbage 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



scarce veils the whinstone rock, and there meteors plunging into the 
night became to him a company of angehc spirits, carrying the soul of 
Bishop Aidan heavenward. Slowly Cuthbert's longings settled into a 
resolute will towards a religious life, and he made his way at last to a 
group of log-shanties in the midst of untilled solitudes, where a few Irish 
monks from Lindisfarne had settled in the mission-station of Melrose. 
To-day the land is a land of poetry and romance. Cheviot and 
Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and Annan- water, are 
musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy. Agriculture has j 
chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage and steam-power ' 
have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to see the \, 
Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and ; 
farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and | 
there with clusters of wooden hovels, and crossed by boggy tracks, i 
over which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about 
them. The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were 
for the most part Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference, 
they yielded to their thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity 
as these had yielded to the king. But they retained their old supersti- 
tions side by side with the new worship ; plague or mishap drove them 
back to a reliance on their heathen charms and amulets ; and if trouble 
befell the Christian preachers who came settling among them, they 
took it as proof of the wrath of the older gods. When some log- 
rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the construction of an 
abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at work on 
them out to sea, the rustic bystanders shouted, "Let nobody pray 
for them. ; let nobody pity these men, who have taken away from us our 
old worship ; and how their new-fangled customs are to be kept nobody 
knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wandered among listeners 
such as these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from 
whose roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Unlike 
his Irish comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from village 
to village ; the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians listened wiUingly to 
one who was himself a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the 
rough Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Leader. His patience, 
his humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and 
not less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for 
the hard life he had chosen. " Never did man die of hunger who 
served God faithfully," he would say, when nightfall found them supper- 
less in the waste. " Look at the eagle overhead ! God can feed us 
through him if He will " — and once at least he owed his meal to a fish 
that the scared bird let fall. A snowstorm drove his boat on the coast 
of Fife. " The snow closes the road along the shore," mourned his 
comrades ; ** the storm bars our way over sea." " There is still the 
vvay of heaven that lies open," said Cuthbert. 



26 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 

Kingdom. 
607- 
685. 

Csedmon. 

664. 



Engrlisb 
soufT. 



While missionaries were thus labouring among its peasantry, North- 
umbria saw the rise of a host of monasteries, not bound indeed by 
the strict ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic 
model of the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person 
who sought devotional retirement. 

The most notable and wealthy of these houses was that of Streono 
shalh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her abbey on the 
summit of the dark cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern 
Sea. Whitby became the Westminster of the Northumbrian kings \ 
within its walls stood the tombs of Eadwine and of Oswi, with nobles 
and queens grouped around them. Hild was herself a Northumbrian 
Deborah, whose counsel was sought even by bishops and kings ; 
and the double monastery over which she ruled became a seminary 
of bishops and priests. The sainted John of Beverley was among 
her scholars. But the name which really throws glory over Whitby 
is the name of a cowherd from whose lips during the reign of Oswi 
flowed the first great English song. Though well advanced in years. 
Credmon had learnt nothing of the art of verse, the alliterative jingle 
so common among his fellows, " wherefore being sometimes at feasts, 
when all agreed for glee's sake to sing in turn, he no sooner saw 
the harp come towards him than he rose from the board and turned 
homewards. Once when he had done thus, and gone from the feast to 
the stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there appeared 
to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, ' Sing, 
Caedmon, some song to Me/ * I cannot sing,' he answered ; * for this 
cause left I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with him 
answered, * However that be, you shall sing to Me.' * What shall I 
sing?' rejoined Caedmon. ' The beginning of created things,' rephed 
He. In the morning the cowherd stood before Hild and told his 
dream. Abbess and brethren alike concluded ' that heavenly grace 
had been conferred on him by the Lord.' They translated for Casdmon 
a passage in Holy Writ, ^ bidding him, if he could, put the same into 
verse.' The next morning he gave it them composed in excellent verse, 
whereon the abbess, understanding the divine grace in the man, bade 
him quit the secular habit and take on him the monastic life." Piece 
by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into Caedmon's poem. " He 
sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of man, and of all the 
history of Israel ; of their departure from Egypt and entering into the 
Promised Land ; of the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ, 
and of His ascension ; of the terror of future judgment, the horror of 
hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven." 

To men of that day this sudden burst of song seemed a thing 
necessarily divine. " Others after him strove to compose rehgious 
poems, but none could vie with him, for he learnt not the art of poetry 
from men, nor of men, but from God." It was not that any revolution 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



27 



had been wrought by Csedmon in the outer form of English song, as 
it had grown out of the stormy life of the pirates of the sea. The war- 
song still remained the true type of English verse, a verse without art 
or conscious development or the delight that springs from reflection, | 
powerful without beauty, obscured by harsh metaphors and involved 
construction, but eminently the verse of warriors, the brief passionate 
expression of brief passionate emotions. Image after image, phrase 
after phrase, in these early poems, starts out vivid, harsh, and emphatic. 
The very metre is rough with a sort of self-violence and repression ; 
the verses fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle. Hard toilers, 
fierce fighters, with huge appetites whether for meat or the ale-bowl, 
the one breath of poetry that quickened the animal life of the first 
Enghshman was the poetry of war. But the faith of Christ brought 
in, as we have seen, new realms of fancy. The legends of the heavenly 
light, Baeda's story of " The Sparrow," show the side of English tem- 
perament to which Christianity appealed — its sense of the vague, vast 
mystery of the world and of man, its dreamy revolt against the narrow 
bounds of experience and life. It was this new poetic world which 
combined with the old in the epic of Casdmon. In the song of the 
Whitby cowherd the vagueness and daring of the Teutonic imagi- 
nation float out beyond the limits of t^e Hebrew story to a " swart 
hell without light and full of flame," swept only at dawn by the icy 
east wind, on whose floor lie bound the apostate angels. The human 
energy of the German race, its sense of the might of individual ; 
manhood, transformed in Caedmon's verse the Hebrew Tempter | 
into a rebel Satan, disdainful of vassalage to God. " I may be a I 
God as He," Satan cries amidst his torments, " Evil it seems to 1 
me to cringe to Him for any good." Even in this terrible outburst of the 
fallen spirit, we catch the new pathetic note which the Northern melan- 
choly was to give to our poetry. " This is to me the chief of sorrow, 
that Adam, wrought of earth, should hold my strong seat — should joy 
in our torment. Oh, that for one winters space I had power with my 
hands, then with this- host I — but around me lie the iron bonds, and 
this chain galls me." On the other hand, the enthusiasm for the 
Christian God, faith in whom had been bought so dearly by years of 
desperate struggle, breaks out in long rolls of sonorous epithets of praise 
and adoration. The temper of Casdmon brings him near to the earlier 
fire and passion of the Hebrew, as the history of his time brought him 
near to the old Bible history, with its fights and wanderings. '* The 
wolves sing their horrid evensong ; the fowls of war, greedy of battle, 
dewy feathered, scream around the host of Pharaoh," as wolf howled 
and eagle screamed round the host of Penda. Everywhere Caedmon is 
a type of the new grandeur, depth, and fervour of tone which the 
German race was to give to the rehgion of the East. 

But even while Caiidmon was singing, the Christian Church of North- 



Synod of 
itby. 



»yno 



28 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



umbria was torn in two by a strife, whose issue was decided in the same 
abbey of Whitby where the cowherd dwelt. The labour of Aidan, the 
victories of Oswald and Oswi, seemed to have annexed England to the 
Irish Church. The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses 
whose foundation followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesi- 
astical tradition, not to Rome but to Ireland ; and quoted for their 
guidance the instructions, not of Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever 
claims of supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by 
the see of Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in 
the North of England was the Abbot of lona. But Rome was already 
moving to regain the ground she had lost, and her efforts were seconded 
by those of two men whose love of Rome mounted to a passionate 
fanaticism. The life of Wilfrith of York was a mere series of flights to 
Rome and returns to England, of wonderful successes in pleading the 
right of Rome to the obedience of the Church of Northumbria, and of 
as wonderful defeats. Benedict Biscop worked towards the same end 
in a quieter fashion, coming backwards and forwards across sea with 
books and relics and cunning masons and painters to rear a great 
church and monastery at Wearmouth, whose brethren owned obedience 
to the Roman See. The strife between the two parties rose so high at 
last that Oswi was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council at 
Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of England should be 
decided. The points actually contested were trivial enough. Colman, 
Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish fashion of the 
tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter : Wilfrith pleaded for 
the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the authority of Columba, 
the other to that of St. Peter. " You own," cried the puzzled king at last 
to Colman, " that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of 
heaven — has He given such power to Columba t " The Bishop could 
but answer " No." ^' Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven,'' 
said Oswi, "lest when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his 
keeping turn his back on me, and there be none to open." The im- 
portance of Oswi's judgment was never doubted at Lindisfarne, where 
Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren, and thirty 
of their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan, and sailed away to 
lona. Trivial, in fact, as were the actual points of difference which severed 
the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion 
Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after 
fortunes of England. Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later 
ecclesiastical history of England would probably have resembled that 
of Ireland. Devoid of that power of organization which was th^ 
strength of the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish 
heme took the clan system of the country as the basis of church 
government. Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical controversies became 
i inextricably confounded ; and the clergy, robbed of all really spiritual 



1.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



29 



Sec. III. 



Thk 

Northum- 
brian 

Kingdom. 
607- 
685. 



-690. 



influence, contributed no element save that of disorder to the state. 
Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast rehgious authority wielded by 
hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from morality, the absence 
of those larger and more humanizing influences which contact with a 
wider world alone can give, this is the picture which the Irish Church 

of later times presents to us. It was from such a chaos as this that 

England was saved by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby. j 

The Church of England, as we know it to-day, is the work, so far as | "^^^^^^ 
its outer form is concerned, of a Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, | 
whom Rome in 668 despatched after her victory at Whitby to secure 
England to her sway, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore's work 
was determined in its main outlines by the previous history of the 
English people. The conquest of the Continent had been wrought 
either by races such as the Goths, which were already Christian, or 
by heathens like the Franks, who bowed to the Christian faith of the 
nations they conquered. To this oneness of religion between the Ger- 
man invaders of the Empire and their Roman subjects was owing the 
preservation of all that survived of the Roman world. The Church 
everywhere remained untouched. The Christian bishop became the 
defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his Gothic and Lom- 
bard conqueror, the mediator between the Germ.an and his subjects, 
the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To the 
barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that 
was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of art. 
But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been exterminated 
together. When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, 
the very memory of the older Christian Church which existed in 
Roman Britain had passed away. The first Christian missionaries, 
strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the 
courts of the kings, who were their first converts, and whose conversion 
was generally followed by that of their people. The English bishops 
were thus at first royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally 
nothing but the kingdom. Realms which are all but forgotten are 
thus commemorated in the limits of existing sees. That of Rochester 
represented till of late an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the 
frontier of the original kingdom of Mercia may be recovered by follow- 
ing the map of the ancient bishopric of Lichfield. Theodore's first work 
was to add many new sees to the old ones ; his second was to group 
all of them round the one centre of Canterbury. All ties between 
England and the Irish Church were roughly broken. Lindisfarne 
sank into obscurity with the flight of Colman and his monks. The 
new prelates, gathered in synod after synod, acknowledged the authority 
of their one primate. The organization of the episcopate was followed 
by the organization of the parish system. The loose system of the 
mission-station, the monastery from which priest and bishop went 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



forth on journey after journey to preach and baptize, as Aidan went 
forth from Lindisfarne, or Cuthbert from Melrose, naturally disappeared 
as the land became Christian. The missionaries became settled clergy. 
The holding of the English noble or landowner became the parish, and 
his chaplain the parish priest, as the king's chaplain had become the 
bishop, and the kingdom his diocese. A source of permanent endow- 
ment for the clergy was found at a later time in the revival of the 
Jewish system of tithes, and in the annual gift to Church purposes of 
a tenth of the produce of the soil ; while discipline within the Church 
itself was provided for by an elaborate code of sin and penance, in 
which the principle of compensation, which lay at the root of Teu- 
tonic legislation, crept into the relations between God and the soul. 

In his work of organization, in his creation of parishes, in his 
arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them round 
the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesiastical canons, 
Theodore was unconsciously doing a political work. The old divisions 
of kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for 
the most part from mere accidents of the conquest, were fast breaking 
down. The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed by the 
three larger ones, and of these three Mercia and Wessex were com- 
pelled to bow to the overlordship of Northumbria. The tendency to 
national unity which was to characterize the new England had thus 
already declared itself ; but the policy of Theodore clothed with a 
sacred form and surrounded with divine sanctions a unity which 
as yet rested on no basis but the sword. The single throne of the 
one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds to the thought 
of a single throne for their one temporal overlord at York, or, as in later 
days, at Lichfield or at Winchester. The regular subordination of priest 
to bishop, of bishop to primate, in the administration of the Church, 
supplied a mould on which the civil organization of the state quickly 
shaped itself. Above all, the councils gathered by Theodore were the 
first of all national gatherings for general legislation. It was at a 
much later time that the Wise Men of Wessex, or Northumbria, or 
Mercia, learned to come together in the Witenagemote of all England. 
It was the ecclesiastical synods which by their example led the way 
to our national parliaments, as it was the canons enacted in such 
synods which led the way to a national system of law. But if the 
movement towards national unity was furthered by the centralizing 
tendencies of the Church, it was furthered as powerfully by the over- 
powering strength of Northumbria. In arms the kingdom had but a 
single rival. Mercia, as we have seen, had partially recovered from 
the absolute subjection in which it was left after Penda's fall by 
shaking off the government of Oswi's thegns, and by choosing Wulfere 
for its king. Wulfere was a vigorous and active ruler, and the peace- j 
ful reign of Oswi left him free to build up again during seventeen years 



I.] 



rilE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



31 



of vigorous rule (659-675), the Mercian overlordship over the tribes 
of mid-England, Avhich had been lost at Penda's death. For a while 
he had more than his father's success. Not only did Essex again own 
his supremacy, but even London fell into Mercian hands. The West- 
Saxons, who had been long ago stripped of their conquests along 
the Severn by Penda, were driven across the Thames by Wulfere, and 
all their settlements to the north of that river were annexed to the 
Mercian realm. One result of Wulfere's conquest remains to the 
present day; for the old bishop-stool of the West-Saxons had been 
established by Birinus at what was then the royal city of Dorchester ; 
and it is to its retreat, with the kings of Wessex, to the town which j 
became the new capital of their shrunken realm that we owe the ' 
bishopric of Winchester. The supremacy of Mercia soon reached even 
across the Thames, for Sussex, in its dread of the West-Saxons, found 
protection in accepting Wulfere^s overlordship, and its king was 
rewarded by a gift of the two outlying settlements of the Jutes — the 
Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras along the Southampton 
^ater — which w^e must suppose had been reduced by Mercian arms. 

The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in 
hand with its military advance. The forests of its western border, the 
marshes of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by 
monastic colonies, whose success shows the hold which Christianity 
had now gained over its people. Heathenism, indeed, still held its own 
in the western woodlands, where the miners around Alcester drowned 
the voice of Bishop Ecgwine of Worcester, as he preached to them, 
with the din of their hammers. But in spite of their hammers 
Ecgwine's preaching left one lasting mark behind it. The bishop 
heard how a swineherd coming out from the forest depths on a sunny 
glade had seen the Three Fair Women of the old German mythology 
seated round a mystic bush and singing their unearthly song. In 
his fancy the Fair Women transformed themselves into a vision of 
the mother of Christ ; and the silent glade soon became the site of an 
abbey dedicated to her, and of a town which sprang up under its shelter 
— the Evesham which was to be hallowed in after time by the fall of 
Earl Simon of Leicester. Wilder even than the Avestern woodland was 
the desolate fen-country on the eastern border of the kingdom stretch- 
ing from the " Holland," the sunk, hollow land of Lincolnshire, to the 
channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallovv^ waters and reedy islets 
wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by flocks of scream- 
ing wild-fowl. Here through the liberality of King Wulfere rose the 
abbey of Peterborough. Here, too, Guthlac^ a youth of the royal race of 
Mercia, sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes of Crowland, 
and so great was the reverence he won, that only two years had passed 
since his death when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over his 
tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site ; the buildings rested 



Sbc. III. 

The 

Northum- 
brian 
Kingdom. 

607- 
685. 



Progres? 

of 
Mercia* 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Si-c. III. I on oaken piles driven into the marsh ; a great stone church replaced the 
hermit^s cell ; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed the pools 
around them into fertile meadow-land. The abbey of Ely, as stately as 
that of Crowland, was founded in the same wild fen country by the Lady 
^thelthryth, the wife of King Ecgfrith, who in the year 670 succeeded 
Oswi on the throne of Northumbria. Her flight from Ecgfrith's pursuit, 
and the shelter given her by Wulfere, may have aided to hurry on fresh 
contests between the two kingdoms. But the aid was hardly needed. 
His success was long and unvarying enough to fire Wulfere to a renewal 
of his father's effort to shake off the Northumbrian overlordship, an 
overlordship which Mercia had not ceased to acknowledge even though 
she had freed herself from the yoke of direct subjection. But the 
vigorous and warlike Ecgfrith was a different foe from the West- 
Saxon or the Jute, and the defeat of the king of Mercia was so 
complete that he was glad to purchase peace by giving up to his 
conquerors the province of the Lindiswaras or Lincolnshire. 

Peace would have been purchased more hardly had not Ecgfrith's 
ambition turned rather to conquests over the Briton than to victories 
over his fellow Englishmen. The war between Briton and English- 
man, which had languished since the battle of Chester, had been revived 
some twelve years before by an advance of the West- Saxons to 
the south-west. Unable to save the possessions of Wessex north 
of th^ Thames from the grasp of Wulfere, its king, Cenwalh, sought 
for compensation in an attack on his Welsh neighbours. A victory 
at Bradford on the Avon enabled him to overrun the country 
north of Mendip, which had till then been held by the Britons ; 
and a second campaign in 658, which ended in a victory on the 
skirts of the great forest that covered Somerset to the east, settled 
the West- Saxons as conquerors round the sources of the Parret. It 
was probably the example of the West-Saxons which spurred Ecgfrith 
to a series of attacks upon his British neighbours in the west which 
raised Northumbria to its highest pitch of glory. Up to the very 
moment of his fall indeed the reign of Ecgfrith marks the highest 
pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies chased the Britons from 
the kingdom of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English 
ground. A large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the 
see of Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have 
seen before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. After years of 
mission labour at Melrose, Cuthbert had quitted it for Holy Island, 
and preached among the moors of Northumberland as he had preached 
beside the banks of Tweed. He remained there through the great 
secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby, and became prior 
of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with endless disputes, 
against which his patience and good humour struggled in vain. Worn 
out at last he fled to a little sandbank, one of a group of islets not far 



r 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



33 



from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for the most part with kelp Sec. III. 
and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal. In the midst of it 
rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within deep into the 
rock, and roofed with logs and straw. 

The reverence for his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back in old age to 
fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne. He entered Carlisle, which the King 
had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a moment when all Northumbria 
was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of Ecgfrith's against the 
Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had long been the northern 
limit of Northumbria, and the Whithern, the "white stone town," 
in which a Northumbrian bishop, Trumwine, fixed the seat of his 
new bishopric of Galloway, was a sign of the subjection of the 
Britons of that district to the Northumbrian overlordship. Ecgfrith, 
however, resolved to carry his conquests further to the north, and 
crossing the Firth of Forth, his army marched in the year 685 
into the land of the Picts. A sense of coming ill weighed on 
Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the 
curses which had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its 
king, Avhen his navy, setting out a year before from the newly-conquered 
western coast, swept the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like 
sacrilege to those wholga rod jthc J LQme of Aidan and Colum.ba. As 
(iuthbert bent ov^^:^^^5^^R^^p^ |ilua^^ still stood unharmed 

amxongst the ruifts oiV^arlisle, the a!ni|im§Sbystanders thought they 
caught w^ords of ill-omen faUing from the olownan's lips. "Perhaps," 
he seemed to niufmur, " at this very hour the* peril of the fight is over 
and done." ^* \Vatth and pray," he said, wjSen they questioned him on 
the morrow ; " watch and pray." In ^ ^fhW days more a solitary fugi- 
tive escaped from the slaught^i t^olA" that the Picts had turned des- 
perately to bay, as the English army entered Fife ; and that Ecgfrith 
and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on the far- 
oli* moorland of Nechtansmere (685). 

To Cuthbert the tidings were tidings of death. His bishopric was 
soon laid aside, and two months after his return to his island-hermitage 
the old man lay dying, murmuring to the last words of concord and 
peace. A signal of his death had been agreed upon, and one of those 
who stood by ran with a candle in each hand to a place whence the 
light might be seen by a monk who was looking out from the watch- 
tower of Lindisfarne. As the tiny gleam flashed over the dark reach 
of sea, and the watchman hurried with his news into the church, the 
brethren of Holy Island were singing, as it chanced, the words of 
the Psalmist : " Thou hast cast us out and scattered us abroad ; Thou 
hast also been displeased ; Thou hast shown thy people heavy 
things ; Thou hast given us a drink of deadly wine." The chant 
was the dirge, not of Cuthbert only, but of his church and his people. 
Over both hung from that hour the gloom of a seeming failure. 

D 



Death of 



34 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Strangers who knew not lona and Columba entered into the heritage 
of Aidan and Cuthbert. As the Roman Communion folded England 
again beneath her wing, men forgot that a Church which passed 
utterly away had battled with Rome for the spiritual headship of 
Western Christendom, and that English rehgion had for a hundred 
years its centre not at Canterbury, but at Lindisfarne. Nor were men 
long to remember that from the days of ^Ethelfrith to the days of 
Ecgfrith English politics had found their centre at York. But, for- 
gotten or no, Northumbria had done its work. By its missionaries 
and by its sword it had won England from heathendom to the Christian 
Church. It had given her a new poetic literature. Its monasteries 
were already the seat of whatever intellectual life the country possessed. 
Above all it had been the first to gather together into a loose political 
unity the various tribes of the English people, and by standing at their 
head for nearly a century to accustom them to a national life, out of 
which England, as we have it now, was to spring. 

Section IV.— The OverlordsMp of Mercia, 685—823. 

[Authorities. — A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved among the 
meagre annals of Wessex, which form, during this period, *'The English 
Chronicle. " But for the most part we are thrown upon later writers, especially 
Henry of Huntingdon and William ofMalmesbury, both authors of the twelfth 
century, but having access to older materials now lost. The letters of Boniface, 
which form the most valuable contemporary materials for this period, are given 
by Dr. Giles (Bonifacii Opera Omnia. London : 1844). Those of Alcwine 
have been carefully edited by Jaffe in his series of Monumenta Germanica.] 



The supremacy of Northumbria fell for ever with the death of 
Ecgfrith and the defeat of Nechtansmere. To the north the flight of 
Bishop Trumwine from Whithern announced the revolt of Galloway 
from her rule. In the south, Mercia at once took up again the projects 
of independence which had been crushed by Wulfere's defeat. His 
successor, the Mercian king ^thelred, again seized the province of 
the Lindiswaras, and the war he thus began with Northumbria was 
only ended by a peace negotiated through Archbishop Theodore, 
which left him master of Middle England, and free to attempt the 
direct conquest of the south. For the moment indeed the attempt 
proved a fruitless one, for at the instant of Northumbrians fall Wessex 
rose into fresh power under Ini, the greatest of its early kings. Under 
his predecessor, Centwine, it had again taken up its war with the Britons, 
and conquered as far as the Quantocks. Ini, whose reign covered the 
long period from 688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war 
which Centwine had begun. He pushed his way southward round the 
marshes of the Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier 
of his new conquests by a wooden fort on the banks of the Tone, which has 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



35 



grown into the present Taunton. The West-Saxons thus became masters 
of the whole district which now bears the name of Somerset, the shire 
of the Sumer-soetas, where the Tor rose hke an island out of a waste 
of flood-drowned fen that stretched westward to the Channel. At 
the base of this hill Ini estabhshed on the site of an older British 
foundation his famous monastery of Glastonbury. The monastery pro- 
bably took this English name from an English family, the Glaestings, 
who chose the spot for their settlement ; but it had long been a place 
of pilgrimage, and the tradition of its having been the resting-place of 
a second Patrick drew thither the wandering scholars of Ireland. The 
first inhabitants of Ini's abbey found, as they alleged, " an ancient 
church built by no art of man;" and to this relic of a Roman time they 
added their own oratory of stone. The spiritual charge of his con- 
quests Ini committed to Ealdhelm, the most famous scholar of his day, 
who became the first bishop of the see of Sherborne, which the king 
formed out of a part of the older diocese of Winchester so as to include 
the new parts of his kingdom. Ini's code, the earliest collection of West- 
Saxon laws which remains to us, shows a wise solicitude to provide for 
the civil as well as the ecclesiastical organization of his kingdom. His 
repulse of the Mercians, when they at last attacked Wessex, showed 
how well he could provide for its defence. Ceolred, the successor 
of -^thelred on the throne of Mercia, began the struggle with Wessex 
for the overlordship of the south ; but he was repulsed in 714 in a 
bloody encounter at Wodnesburh on the borders of the two kingdoms. 
Able however as Ini was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush 
the civil strife that was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells 
the story of the disgust which drove him from the world. He had 
feasted royally at one of his country houses, and on the morrow, as 
he rode from it, his queen bade him turn back thither. The king 
returned to find his house stripped of curtains and vessels, and foul 
with refuse and the dung of cattle, while in the royal bed where he 
had slept with ^thelburh rested a sow with her farrow of pigs. 
'The scene had no need of the queen's comment : " See, my lord, 
how the fashion of this world passeth away ! '' In 726 Ini laid down 
his crown, and sought peace and death in a pilgrimage to Rome. 

The anarchy which had driven Ini from the throne broke out on his 
departure in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to the suc- 
cessor of Ceolred. Among those who sought Guthlac's retirement at 
Crowland came ^thelbald, a Mercian of royal blood flying from 
Ceolred's hate. Driven off again and again by the king's pursuit, 
iEthelbald still returned to the Httle hut he had built beside the hermit- 
age, comforting himself in hours of despair with his companion's words. 
" Know how to wait," said Guthlac, " and the kingdom will come to 
thee; not by violence or rapine, but by the hand of God." In 716 
Ceolred fell frenzy-smitten at his board, and Mercia chose i^thelbald 

D 2 



36 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CHAPe. 



for its king. Already the realm reached from H umber to Thames ; 
and ^thelred, crossing the latter river, had reduced Kent beneath his 
over lordship. But with ^Ethelbald began Mercians fiercest struggle for 
the complete supremacy of the south. He penetrated into the very heart 
of the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege and capture of the royal town 
of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For twenty years the overlordship 
of Mercia was recognized by all Britain south of the Humber. ^Ethel- 
bald styled himself " King not of the Mercians only, but of all the 
neighbouring peoples who are called by the common name of Southern 
English.'' Tlfe use of a title unknown till his day, that of " King of 
Britain,'^ betrayed the daring hope that the creation of an Enghsh 
realm, so long attempted in vain by the kings of Northumbria, might 
be reserved for the new power of Mercia. But the aim of ^thelbald 
was destined to the same failure as that of his predecessors. England 
north of Humber was saved from his grasp by the heroic defence made 
by the Northumbrian king Eadberht, who renewed for a while the 
fading glories of his kingdom by an alliance with the Picts, which 
enabled him in '](i'^ to conquer Strathclyde, and take its capital, 
Alcluyd, or Dumbarton. Southern England was wrested from Mercia 
by a revolt into which the West-Saxons were driven through the intoler- 
able exactions of their new overlord. At the head of his own Mercian 
army, and of the subject hosts of Kent, Essex, and East-Anglia,. 
^thelbald marched in 752 to the field of Burford, where the West- 
Saxons were again marshalled under the golden dragon of their 
race ; but after hours of desperate fighting in the very forefront of the 
battle, a sudden panic seized the Mercian king, and he fled first of his 
army from the field. A second Mercian defeat at Secandun in 755. 
confirmed the freedom of Wessex, but amidst the rout of his host 
^thelbald redeemed the one hour of shame that had tarnished his 
glory. He refused to fly, and fell on the field. 

While Mercia was thus battling for the overlordship of the south, 
Northumbria had set aside its glory in arms for the pursuits of peace. 
Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Eadfrith the 
Learned and Coelwulf, their kingdom became in the middle of 
the eighth century the literary centre of the Christian world in 
Western Europe. No schools were more famous than those of 
Jarrow and York. The whole learning of the age seemed to be 
summed up in a Northumbrian scholar. Baeda — the Venerable 
Bede as later times styled him — was born about ten years after the 
Synod of Whitby, beneath the shade of a great abbey which Benedict 
Biscop was rearing by the mouth of the Wear. His youth was trained 
and his long tranquil life was wholly spent in an offshoot of Benedict's 
house which was founded by his scholar Ceolfrid. Basda never stirred 
from Jarrow. " I spent my whole life in the same monastery," he 
says, " and while attentive to the rule of my order and the service 



I.] 



THE ENGLISK KINGDOMS. 



37 



of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, 
■or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more 
touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English 
scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, 
the tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, 
dawned for Englishmen in the story of Baeda. While still young, he 
became teacher, and six hundred monks, besides strangers that flocked 
thither for instruction, formed his school of J arrow. It is hard to ima- 
gine how among the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the 
monk Baeda could have found time for the composition of the numerous 
works that made his name famous in the West. But materials for 
study had accumulated in Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrith 
and Benedict Biscop, and Archbishop Ecgberht was forming the first 
English library at York. The tradition of the older Irish teachers still 
lingered to direct the young scholar into that path of Scriptural inter- 
pretation to which he chiefly owed his fame. Greek, a rare accom- 
plishment in the West, came to him from the school which the Greek 
Archbishop Theodore founded beneath the walls of Canterbury. 
His skill in the ecclesiastical chaunt was derived from a Roman cantor 
whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop. Little by 
little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole range of 
the science of his time ; he became, as Burke rightly styled him, " the 
father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic culture 
w^as first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and Aristotle, of 
Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over him the 
same spell that he cast over Dante ; verses from the ^Eneid break his 
narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of the 
great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of spring. 
His work was done with small aid from others. " I am my own secre- 
tary," he writes ; " I make my own notes. I am my own librarian.^' 
But forty- five works remained after his death to attest his pro- 
digious industry. In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the 
most important among these were the commentaries and homilies 
upon various books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings 
of the Fathers. But he was far from confining himself to theology. 
In treatises compiled as text-books for his scholars, Baeda threw 
together all that the world had then accumulated in astronomy and 
meteorology, in physics and music, in philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, 
arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopaedic character of his researches 
left him in heart a simple Englishman. He loved his own English 
tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last work was a translation 
into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost the last words that 
broke from his lips were some English rhymes upon death. 

But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which 
immortalizes his name. In his " Ecclesiastical History of the Enghsh 



3B 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Nation," Basda was at once the founder of mediaeval history and the 
first English historian. All that we really know of the century and a 
half that follows the landing of Augustine, we know from him. 
Wherever his own personal observation extended, the story is told with 
admirable detail and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the 
portions which he owed to his Kentish friends, Alcwine and Nothelm. 
What he owed to no informant was his own exquisite faculty of story- 
telling, and yet no story of his own telling is so touching as the story 
of his death. Two weeks before the Easter of j$$ the old man was 
seized with an extreme weakness and loss of breath. He still pre- 
served, however, his usual pleasantness and gay good-humour, and in 
spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his lectures to the pupils 
about him. Verses of his own English tongue broke from time to time 
from the master's lip — rude rimes that told how before the "need-fare," 
Death's stern " must-go," none can enough bethink him what is to be 
his doom for good or ill. The tears of Basda's scholars mingled with 
his song. " We never read without weeping," writes one of them. So 
the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and still master and pupils toiled 
at their work, for Baeda longed to bring to an end his version of St. 
John's Gospel into the English tongue, and his extracts from Bishop 
Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read 'a lie," he answered those 
who would have had him rest, '^ or to work to no purpose, after I am 
gone." A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, 
but he spent the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his 
scholars, "Learn with what speed you may ; I know not how long I 
may last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again the 
old man called his scholars round him and bade them write. " There 
is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning drew on,. 
" and it is hard for thee to question thyself any longer." " It is easily 
done," said Baeda ; ^* take thy pen and write quickly." Amid tears 
and farewells the day wore on to eventide. " There is yet one sentence 
unwritten, dear master," said the boy. " Write it quickly," bade the 
dying man. " It is finished now," said the little scribe at last. " You 
speak truth," said the master ; " all is finished now." Placed upon the 
pavement, his head supported in his scholar's arms, his face turned to 
the spot where he was wont to pray, B^da chaunted the solemn 
" Glory to God." As his voice reached the close of his song, he 
passed quietly away. 

First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first 
among EngHsh historians, it is in the monk of J arrow that English 
literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered 
round him for instruction he is the father of our national education* 
In his physical treatises he is the first figure to which our science looks 
back. Baeda was a statesman as well as a scholar, and the letter 
I which in the last year of his hfe he addressed to Archbishop Ecgberht 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



39 



of York shows how vigcrously he proposed to battle against the 
growing anarchy of Northumbria. But his plans of reform came too 
late ; and though a king like Eadberht might beat back the inroads of 
the Mercians and even conquer Strathclyde, before the anarchy of 
his own kingdom even Eadberht could only fling down his sceptre 
and seek a refuge in the cloisters of Lindisfarne. From the death 
of Bseda the history of Northumbria is in fact only a wild story of 
lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was swept away by 
treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its turbulent 
nobles, the very fields lay waste, and the land was swept by famine 
and plague. An anarchy almost as complete had fallen on Wessex 
after its repulse of ^thelbald's invasion. Only in Mercia was there 
any sign of order and settled rule. 

The two crushing defeats at Burford and Secandun were far 
from having broken the Mercian power. Under Offa, w^hose 
reign from 758 to 796 covers with that of ^thelbald nearly the 
whole of the eighth century, it rose to a height unknown before. 
The energy of the new king was shown in his struggle with the 
Welsh on his western border. Since the dissolution of the tem- 
porary alHance which Penda formed with the Welsh King Cadwallon, 
the war with the Britons in the west had been the one fatal hindrance 
to the progress of Mercia. ^Ethelbald had led in vain the united 
forces of his under-kings, and even of Wessex, against Wales. 
But it was under Offa that Mercia first really braced herself to the 
completion of her British conquests. Beating back the Welsh from 
Hereford, and carrying his own ravages into the heart of Wales, Offa 
drove the King of PoAvys from his capital, which changed its old name 
of Pengwern for the significant English title of the Town in the Scrub 
or Bush, Scrobbesbyn/g, Shrewsbury. Fxperience, however, had taught 
the Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these. Offa resolved to 
create a military border by planting a settlement of Englishmen 
between the Severn, which had till then served as the western boundary 
of the English race, and the huge " Offals Dyke," which he drew from 
the mouth of Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later conquests of 
the West- Saxons, we find the old plan of extermination definitely 
abandoned. The Welsh who chose to remain dwelt undisturbed 
among their English conquerors, and it was to regulate the mutual 
relations of the two races that Offa drew up a code of Mercian laws 
which bore his name. From these conquests over the Britons, Offa 
turned to make a fresh attempt to gain that overlordship over Britain 
which his predecessors had failed to win. His policy was marked by 
a singular combination of activity and self-restraint. He refrained 
carefully from any effort to reahze his aim by force of arms. An 
expedition against the town of Hastings, indeed, with a victory at 
Otford on the Derwent, reasserted the supremacy of Mercia over Kent, 



The Over- 
lordship OF 
Mercia, 
685- 
823. 



40 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. IV. when it was shaken for a time by a revolt of the Kentishmen ; and East- 
Angha seems to have been directly annexed to the Mercian kingdom. 
But his relations with Northumbria and with Wessex were for the 
most part peaceful, and his aim was rather at the exercise of a com- 
m.anding influence over them than at the assertion of any overlordship 
in name. He avenged ^thelbald's defeats by a victory over the West- 
Saxons at Bensington, but he attempted no subjugation of their country. 
He contented himself with placing a creature of iiis own on its throne, 
and with wedding him to his daughter Eadburh. The marriage of a 
second daughter with the King of Northumbria established a similar 
influence in the north. Both the Northumbrian and the West- Saxon 
king were threatened by rival claimants of their thrones, and bo^th 
looked for aid against them to the arms of Offa. Without jarring 
against their jealous assertion of independence, Offa had in fact 
brought both Wessex and Northumbria into dependence on Mercia. 

Such a supremacy must soon have passed into actual sovereignty, 
but for the intervention at this moment of a power from across the 
sea, the power of the Franks. The connection of the Franks with the 
English kingdoms at this time was brought about by a missionary 
from Wessex. Boniface (or Winfrith) followed in the track of earlier 
preachers, both Irish and English, who had been labouring to little 
purpose among the heathens of Germany, and especially among those 
v/ho had now become subjects to the Franks. It was through the 
disciples whom he planted along the line of his labours that the 
Frankish sovereigns were drawn to an interest in English affairs. 
Whether from mere jealousy of a neighbour state, or from designs 
of an invasion and conquest of England which the growth of any 
great central power in the island would check, the support of the 
v/eaker kingdoms against Mercia became the policy of the Frankish 
Court. When Eadberht of Northumbria was attacked by ^thelbald 
of Mercia, the Frank King Pippin sent him presents and the offer 
of an alliance. When Pippin's son, Charles the Great, succeeded 
him, he received with favour an appeal for protection sent by King 
Ealhred of Northumbria through Lullus, who had followed Boniface 
as Archbishop of Maintz. The Court of Charles became a place of 
refuge for the enemies of Offa ; for Eardwulf, a claimant of the North- 
umbrian crown, who was driven from Northumbria by the husband of 
one of Offa's daughters, and for Ecgberht, a claimant of the West-Sn.xon 
crown, who was driven from Wessex by the husband of another. A revolt 
of Kent against Mercia at last brought Charles and Offa into open 
collision. Kent appealed to Charles for protection, but the threats of 
Charles were met by Offa with defiance. The Mercian army re- 
conquered Kent ; and a plot of Jaenberht, the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, for bringing about a landing of Frankish troops, was discover>?.d 
and defeated. Offa drove the archbishop into exile, and punished 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



41 



his see by setting up Lichfield as a rival archbishopic. The failure of j 
a marriage negotiation widened the breach between the two sovereigns, 
each closed the ports on his own side of the channel against the sub- 
jects .of the other ; and war was only averted by the efforts of a North- 
umbrian scholar, Alcwine, whose learning had secured him the confi- 
dence and friendship of Charles the Great. 

The good sense of the Frankish sovereign probably told him that the 
time was not come for any projects against Britain. Secure on either 
border, his kingdom wealthy with years of peace and order, and his 
armies fresh from victories over Welshman and Kentishman, Offa was ' 
no unworthy antagonist for Charles the Great. Charles therefore not ; 
oni/ declined a struggle^ but negotiated with his rival a treaty, memo- ; 
rable as the first monument of our foreign diplomacy, which secured 
protection for the English merchants and pilgrims who were making 
their way in growing numbers to Rome. But the death of Ofia in : 
796 at once reopened the strife. The hand of Charles was seen 
in a new revolt of Kent, and in the support which he gave to the 
appeal of the Archbishop of Canterbury against the archbishopric ; 
which Offa had set up at Lichfield. Cenw^ulf, Offa's successor, showed 
a vigour and moderation worthy of Offa himself. He roughly put 
down the Kentish revolt, and then conciliated the Kentish archbishop 
by the suppression of the rival see. But the next move of Charles 
proved a more fatal one. On the death of Beornred, the sovereign 
whom Ofia had set up over Wessex, Ecgberht was at once des- 
patched from the Frankish Court, and welcomed by the West-Saxons 
as their king. Some years after, the influence of Charles brought about 
the restoration of Eardwulf, who, like Ecgberht, had taken refuge 
at his court, to the throne of Northumbria. In the north as in the 
south, the work of Offa was thus undone. Within, Mercia was torn by 
a civil war which broke out on Cenwulf s death ; and the weakness 
v.'hich this produced was seen when the old strife with Wessex 
was renewed by his successor. In 823 Beornwulf penetrated into 
Wiltshire, and was defeated in a bloody battle at Ellandun. All Eng- 
land south of the Thames at once submitted to Ecgberht of Wessex, 
and East-Anglia rose in a desperate revolt which proved fatal to its 
Mercian rulers. Beornwulf and his successor Ludeca fell in two great 
defeats at the hands of the East-Anglians ; and Wiglaf had hardly 
mounted the Mercian throne when his exhausted kingdom was called 
on again to encounter the West-Saxon. While Mercia was struggling 
against the revolt of East-Anglia, Ecgberht had carried on the old war 
of Wessex with the Briton, had conquered and colonized Devon, and 
fixed the new English border at the Tamar. The w^eakness of Mercia 
after its two defeats called him to a greater conquest. In 827 his army 
matched northward without a struggle. Wiglaf fled helplessly before 
it ; and Mercia bowed to the W^est- Saxon overlordship. From Mercia 



Sec. IV. 

The Over- 
lordship OF 
jMercia. 
€85- 
823. 



Fall of 
Mercia, 



42 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Ecgberht marched on Northumbrian but a century of bloodshed and 
anarchy had robbed that kingdom of all vigour, and its nobles met him 
at the Don with an acknowledgment of his overlordship. He turned 
to the West ; and the Welsh, who were still smarting from the heavy 
blows inflicted on them by Mercia, submitted to the joint army of 
Mercians and West-Saxons which he led into the field. The dream of 
Eadwine and of Offa seemed at last made real : and in right of an 
overlordship which stretched from the Forth to the British Channel 
Ecgberht styled himself "" the King of the English." 



Section V.— Wessex and the Danes, 800- 



\ 

-8SO. 



[Authorities. — Our history here rests mainly on the English (or Anglo-Saxon) 
Chronicle. The earlier part of this is a compilation, and consists of ( i ) Annals 
of the conquest of South Britain, (2) Short notices of the kings and bishops of 
Wessex, expanded into larger form by copious insertions from Bseda, and after 
his death by briefer additions from some northern sources. (3) It is probable 
that these materials were thrown together, and perhaps translated from Latin 
into English, in Alfred's time, as a preface to the far fuller annals which begin 
with the reign of ^thelwulf, and widen into a great contemporary history when 
they reach that of Alfred himself. Of their character and import as a part of 
English literature, I have spoken in the text. The "Life of Alfred," which 
bears the name of Asser, though valuable, as at least founded on contemporary 
authority, must, in its present shape, be regarded as of a later date. There is 
an admirable modern life of the king by Dr. Pauli. ] 



As the Frank had undermined the greatness of Mercia, so the 
Dane struck down the short-lived greatness of Wessex. Norway and 
its fellow Scandinavian kingdoms, Sweden and Denmark, were being 
brought at this time into more settled order by a series of great 
sovereigns, and the bolder spirits who would not submit to their rule 
were driven to the sea, and embraced a life of piracy and war. Ecgberht 
had hardly brought all Britain under his sway when these Danes, as 
all the Northmen were at this time called, were seen hovering off the 
English coast, and growing in numbers and hardihood as they crept 
southward to the Thames. The first sight of the Danes is as if the hand 
on the dial of history had gone back three hundred years. The same 
Norwegian fiords, the same Frisian sandbanks, pour forth their pirate 
fleets as in the days of Hengest and Cerdic. There is the same Avild panic 
as the black boats of the invaders strike inland along the river reaches, 
or moor round the river islets, the same sights of horror — firing of 
homesteads, slaughter 'of men, women driven off to slavery or shame, 
children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place — as when the 
English invaders attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain 
at the altar by worshippers of Woden, for the Danes were still heathen. 
Letters, arts, religion, governments disappeared before these Northmen 
as before the Northmen of old. But when the wild burst of the storm 
was over, land, people, government reappeared unchanged. England 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



43 



still remained England; the Danes sank quickly into the mass of 
those around them ; and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. 
The secret of this difference between the two invasions was that 
the battle was no longer between men of different races. It was no 
longer a fight between Briton and German, between Englishman and 
Welshman. The Danes were the same people in blood and speech 
with the people they attacked; they were in fact Englishmen bringing 
back to an England that had forgotten its origins the barbaric England 
of its pirate forefathers. Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, 
because nowhere else were the combatants men of one blood and one 
speech. But just for this reason the fusion of the Northmen with their 
foes was nowhere so peaceful and so complete. 

Under Ecgberht and his son iEthelwulf the attacks of the Danes 
were directed to the two extremities of the West-Saxon realm. They 
swept up the Thames to the plunder of London and Canterbury, and 
rearoused the Welsh war oh the frontier of Devon. It was in the 
alliance of the Danes with the Britons that the danger of these earlier 
inroads lay. Ecgberht defeated the united forces of these two enemies 
in a victory at Hengestesdun ; and his son ^thelwulf, who succeeded 
him in 836, drove back the Welsh of North Wales who were encouraged 
to rise in revolt by the same Danish co-operation. Danes and Welshmen 
were beaten again and again, and yet the danger grew greater year by 
year. King ^thelwulf fought strenuously in the defence of his realm ; 
in the defeat of Charmouth, as in the victory at Aclea, he led his troops 
in person against the sea-robbers. The dangers to the Christian faith 
from these heathen assailants roused the clergy to his aid. Swithhun, 
Bishop of Winchester, became ^thelwulf s minister ; Ealhstan, Bishop 
of Sherborne, became the most formidable among the soldiers of the 
Cross. The first complete victory over the Danes in an encounter at the 
mouth of the Parret was of Ealhstan's winning. At last hard fighting 
gained the realm a little respite ; for eight years the Danes left the land, 
and in 858 ^Ethelwulf died in peace. But these earlier Danish forays 
had been mere preludes to the real burst of the Danish storm. When it 
burst in its full force upon the island, it was no longer a series of plunder- 
raids, but the invasion of Britain by a host of conquerors who settled as 
they conquered. In 866 the Danes landed in East-Anglia, and marched 
in the next spring across the Humber upon York. Civil strife, as usual, 
distracted the energies of Northumbria. Its subject-crown was disputed 
by two claimants, and when they united to meet this common danger 
both fell in the same defeat before the walls of their capital. North- 
umbria at once submitted to the Danes, and Mercia was only saved 
by a hasty march of King ^thelred, the successor of ^thelwulf, to its 
aid. ^thelred was the third of ^thelwulf 's sons, who had mounted 
the throne after the short reigns of his brothers, ^thelbald and 
iEthelberht. But the Peace of Nottingham, by which yEthelred 



44 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Cha: 



saved Mercia in %6Z^ gave the Danes leisure to prepare for an inva^ 
of East-Anglia, whose under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner be ^ 
the Danish leaders, was bound to a tree and shot to death with arr^ ■' 
His martyrdom by the heathen made him the St. Sebastian of Engi - 
legend; in later days his figure gleamed from the pictured windows. 
a , y church along the eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of S . 
Edmundsbury rose over his relics. With Eadmund ended the line of 
East-Anglian under-kings, for his kingdom was not only conquered 
but divided among the soldiers of the Danish host, and their leader 
Guthrum assumed its crown. Then the Northmen turned to the richer 
spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen. Peterborough, Crowland, Ely, 
v/ent up in flames, and their monks fled or were slain among the ruins. 
Mercia, though it was as yet still spared from actual conquest, crouched 
in terror before the Danes, acknov/ledged them in 870 as its overlords, 
and paid them tribute. 

In five years the v/ork of Ecgberht had been undone, and England 
north of the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. 
So rapid a conquest as the Danish conquest of Northumbria, Mercia, 
and East-Anglia, had only been made possible by the temper of 
these kingdom.s themselves. To them the conquest was simply their 
transfer from one overlord to another, and it would seem as if they 
preferred the overlordship of the Dane to the overlordship of the West- 
Saxon. It was another sign of the enormous difficulty of welding there 
kingdoms together into a single people. The time had now come fo. 
Wessex to fight, not for supremacy, but for life. As yet it seemed 
paralysed by terror. With the exception of his one march on Notting- 
ham, Kiag ^thelred had done nothing to save his under-kingdoms 
from the wreck. But the Danes no sooner pushed up Thames to Read- 
ing, than the West-Saxons, attacked on their own soil, turned fiercely 
at bay. The tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames was con- 
tested in four doubtful battles, but ^thelred died in the midst of the 
struggle, and in 871 the withdrawal of the Danes left his youngest 
brother ^Elfred king, with a few years' breathing-space for his 
realm. It was easy for the quick eye of Alfred to see that the 
Danes had withdrawn simply with the view of gaining firmer footing 
for a new attack ; indeed, three years had hardly passed before Mercia 
was invaded, and its under-king driven over sea to make place for 
a tributary of the Danes. From Repton half their host marched 
northwards to the Tyne, dividing a land v/here there was little left 
to plunder, colonizing and tilling it, while Guthrum led the rest into 
his kingdom of East-Anglia to prepare for their next year's attack 
on Wessex. In 876 the Danish fleet appeared before Wareham, 
and when driven thence by yElfred, threw themselves into Exeter 
and allied themselves with the Welsh. Through the winter Alfred 
girded himself for this new peril. At break of spring his army closed 



1 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



id the town, while a hired fleet cruised off the coast to guard ' 
nst rescue. The peril of their brethren in Exeter forced a part 
\\' he Danish host which had remained at Wareham to put to sea 
f.." h the view of aiding them, but they were caught in a mist by the 
nglish squadron and driven on the rocks of Swanage. 9 

Exeter was at last starved into surrender, and the Danes a '.. 
swore to leave Wessex. They withdrew to Gloucester, but ^Elfred 
had hardly disbanded his troops when his enemies, roused by the 
arrival of fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at Chippenham, 
and in the mid-winter of 878 marched ravaging over the land. The 
surprise was complete, and for a month or two the general panic left no 
hope of resistance. Alfred, with his small band of followers, could only 
throw himself into a fort raised hastily in the isle of Athelney, among 
the marshes of the Parret. It was a position from which he could 
watch closely the movements of his foes, and with the first burst of 
spring he called the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still 
gathering his troops as he moved, marched through Wiltshire on the 
Danes. He found their host at Edington, defeated it in a great 
battle, and after a siege of fourteen days forced their camp to sur- 
render. Their leader, Guthrum of East-Anglia, was baptised as a 
Christian and bound by a solemn peace or " frith," at WedmxOre in 
Somerset. For ten years all danger from the Northmen was at an end. \ 
^ With the Peace of Wedmore in 878 began a w^ork even more noble 
than this deliverance of Wessex from the Dane. " So long as I have [ 
lived," wrote /Elfred in later da}^s, " I have striven to live worthily." j 
He longed, when death overtook him, " to leave to the men that come ' 
after a remembrance of him in good works." The aim has been more 
than fulfilled. The memory of the life and doings of the noblest of ■ 
English rulers has come down to us living and distinct through the 
mist of exaggeration and legend that gathered round it. Politically : 
or intellectually, indeed, the sphere of Alfred's action is too small to | 
justify a comparison of him with the few whom the w^orld claims as ' 
•its greatest men. W^hat really lifts him to their level is the moral 
grandeur of his life. He lived solely for the good of his people. He 
is the first instance in the history of Christendom of the Christian 
king, of a ruler who put aside every personal aim or ambition to 
devote himself to the w^elfare of those whom he ruled. So long 
as he lived he strove "to live worthily;" but in his mouth a life 
of worthiness meant a life of justice, temperance, self-sacrifice. 
The Peace of Wedmore at once marked the temper of the man. 
Ardent warrior as he was, with a disorganized England before him, 
he set aside at thirty-one the dream of conquest to leave behind him 
the memory, not of victories but of " good works," of daily toils by 
which he secured peace, good government, education for his people. 
His policy was one of peace. He set aside all dreams of the reco- 



V/essex 

AND THS 

Danes. 
800- 

aso. 

Peace cf 
We diner 2! 



Alfred, 

871 — 502. 



46 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



very of the West- Saxon overlordship. With England across tlse 
Watling Street, a Roman road which ran from Chester to Loii- 
don, in other words with Northumbria, East-Anglia, and the 
bulk of Mercia, Alfred had nothing to do. All that he • ' d 
was his own Wessex, with London and the country round it, cr-Ai ^ ' h 
the districts north of the Thames which the Mercian king Wi'^iere 
had long ago torn away from Wessex, but which the Peace of Wed- 
more restored to Wessex again. Over these latter districts, to which 
the name of Mercia was now confined, while the rest of the Mercian 
kingdom became known as the Five Boroughs of the Danes, yElfred 
set the Ealdorman ^thelred, the husband of his daughter ^Uielhocd, 
a ruler well fitted by his courage and activity to guard Wessex against 
inroads from the north. Against invasion from the sea he provided 
by a closer union of the dependent kingdoms of Kent and Sussex 
with Wessex itself, by the better organization of military service, and 
by the creation of a fleet. 

The defence of his realm thus provided for, he devoted himself 
to its good government. His work was of a simple and practical 
order. He was wanting in the imaginative qualities which mark 
the higher statesman, nor can we trace in his acts any sign of 
a creative faculty or any perception of new ideas. In politics as 
in war, or in his after dealings with letters, he simply took what 
was closest at hand and made the best of it. The laws of Ini 
and Offa^ were' codified and amended, justice was more rigidly 
administered, corporal punishment was substituted in most cases for 
the old blood-wite or money-fine, and the right of private revenge 
was curtailed. The strong moral bent of Alfred's mind was seen in 
some of the novelties of his legislation. The Ten Commandments 
and a portion of the Law of Moses were prefixed to his code, and 
thus became part of the law of the land. Labour on Sundays and 
holydays was made criminal, and heavy punishments were exacted for 
sacrilege, perjury, and the seduction of nuns. Much of the success of 
his actual administration was due, no doubt, to his choice of instru- 
ments. He had a keen eye for men. Denewulf, the Bishop of Win- 
chester, was said to have been a swineherd in the forest when Alfred, 
struck with the quickness of his wit, took him home and reared him at 
his court. The story is a mere legend, but it conveys a popular im- 
pression of the king's rapid recognition of merit in any station. He 
could hardly have chosen braver or more energetic coadjutors than 
those whom he employed both in his political and in his educational 
efforts. The two children whom he himself trained for rule, Eadward 
and ^thelflsed, proved the ablest rulers of their time. But the secret 
of his good government lay mainly in the intense energy of Alfred 
iElfred»5 himself. j 

Character 'y^i^ spirit of adventure that made him in youth the first huntsmanSi 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



47 



of his day, the reckless daring of his eariy manhood, took later and 
graver form in an activity that found time amidst the cares of state for 
the daily duties of religion, for converse with strangers, for study and 
translation, for learning poems by heart, for planning buildings and 
instructing craftsmen in gold-work, for teaching even falconers and 
dog-keepers their business. Restless as he was, his activity was the 
activity of a mind strictly practical. Alfred was pre-eminently a man 
of business, careful of detail, laborious, and methodical. He carried 
in his bosom a little hand-book, in which he jotted down things as 
they struck him ; now a bit of family genealogy, now a prayer, now a 
story, such as that of Bishop Ealdhelm singing sacred songs on the 
bridge. Each hour of the king^s day had its peculiar task ; there was 
the same order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of 
his court. But active and busy as he was, his temper remained simple 
and kindly. We have few stories of his life that are more than mere 
legends, but even legend itself never ventured to depart from the out- 
lines of a character which men knew so well. During his months of 
waiting at Athelney, while the country was overrun by the Danes, he 
was said to have entered a peasant's hut, and to have been bidden by 
the housewife, who did not recognize him, to turn the cakes which 
were baking on the hearth. The young king did as he was bidden, 
but in the sad thoughts which came over him he forgot his task, and 
bore in amused silence the scolding of the good wife, who found her 
cakes spoilt on her return. This tale, if nothing more than a tale, 
could never have been told of a man without humour. Tradition told 
of his genial good-nature, of his chattiness over the adventures of his 
life, and above all of his love for song. In his busiest days Alfred 
found time to learn the old songs of his race by heart, and bade them 
be taught in the Palace-school. As he translated the tales of the 
heathen mythology he lingered fondly over and expanded them, and 
in moments of gloom he found comfort in the music of the Psalms. 

Neither the wars nor the legislation of Alfred were destined to leave 
such lasting traces upon England as the impulse he gave to its litera- 
ture. His end indeed even in this was practical rather than literary. 
What he aimed at was simply the education of his people. As yet 
Wessex was the most ignorant among the English kingdoms. " When 
I began to reign," said Alfred, " I cannot remember one south of 
Thames who could explain his service-book in English." Even in 
the more highly cultivated towns of Mercia and Northumbria the 
Danish sword had left few survivors of the school of Ecgberht or 
B^da. To remedy this ignorance Alfred desired that at least every 
free-born youth who possessed the means should " abide at his book till 
he can well understand Enghsh writing.'' He himself superintended a 
school which he had established for the young nobles of his court. At 
home he found none to help him in his educational efforts but a few 



48 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Shc. V. 
Wessex 

AND THE 

Danes. 
800- 
880. 



Mercian prelates and priests, with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "Formerly/' 
the king writes bitterly, " men came hither from foreign lands to seek 
for instruction, and now when we desire it we can only obtain it from 
abroad.^' But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own 
island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, 
and Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia ; envoys bore his pre- 
sents to the churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission 
carried Peter's-pence to Rome. It was with France, however, that his 
intercourse was closest, and it was from thence that he drew the 
scholars to aid him in his work of education. A scholar named 
Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over the new abbey at Win- 
chester ; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched from the abbey of 
Corbey to rule a monastery and school that Alfred's gratitude for his 
deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of Athelney. 

The real work, however, to be done was done not by these scholars, 
but by the king himself. Alfred resolved to throw open to his people 
in their own tongue the knowledge which had till then been limited to 
the clergy. He took his books as he found them — they were the 
popular manuals of his age — the Consolations of Boethius, the 
Pastorals of Pope Gregory, the compilation of Orosius, then the one 
accessible handbook of universal history, and the hjstory of his own 
people by Baeda. He translated these works into English/ biit he was 
far more than a translator, he was an editor for the peopie. Here he 
omitted, there he expanded. He enriched Orosius by a sketch of the 
new geographical discoveries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon 
form to his selections from Baeda. In one place he stops to explain 
his theory of government, his wish for a thicker population, his con- 
ception of national welfare as consisting in a due balance of the priest, 
the soldier, and the churl. The mention of Nero spurs him to an out- 
break on the abuses of power. The cold Providence of Boethius gives 
way to an enthusiastic acknowledgment of the goodness of God. As 
he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off its royal mantle, and talks 
as a man to men. ''Do not blame me," he prays, with a charming 
simplicity, " if any know Latin better than I, for every man must say 
what he says and do what he does according to his ability." But simple 
as was his aim, Alfred created English literature. Before him, England 
possessed in her own tongue one great poem, that of Caedmon, and a 
train of ballads and battle songs. Prose she had none. The mighty 
roll of the books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of 
Alfred, and above all with the Chronicle of his reign. It seems likely 
that the king's rendering of B^da's history gave the first impulse towards 
the compilation of what is "known as the English or Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle, which was certainly thrown into its present form during his 
I reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and of the bishops of 
1 Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were reughly 



L] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



49 



expanded into a national history by insertions from Basda; but it 
is when it reaches the reign of Alfred that the Chronicle suddenly 
widens into the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that 
marks the gift of a new power to the EngHsh tongue. Varying as it 
does from age to age in historic value, it remains the first vernacular 
history of any Teutonic people, the earliest and the most venerable 
monument of Teutonic prose. The writer of English history may be 
pardoned if he lingers too fondly over the figure of the king in whose 
court, at whose impulse, it may be in whose very words, English 
history begins. 



Section VI.— The West-Saxon Realm, 892-1C16. 

^ [Azit/iorities. — Mainly the English Chronicle, which varies much during this 
-period. Through the reign of Eadward it is copious, and a Mercian chronicle 
is embedded in it ; its entries then become scanty, and are broken with grand 
English songs till the reign of /Ethelred, when its fulness returns. '* Florence 
of Worcester " is probably a translation of a copy of the Chronicle now lost. 
The **Laws" form the basis of our constitutional knowledge of the time, and 
fall into two classes. Those of Eadward, /Ethelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar 
are, like the earlier laws of ^thelberht and Ini, "mainly of the nature of 
amendments of custom." Those of yElfred, yEthelred, Cnut, with those that 
bear the ■ me of Erdward the Confessor, '' aspire to the character of codes," 
All are prir ' in Mr. Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes of the Anglo- 
Saxons ;" but the extracts given by Professor Stubbs (" Documents illustrative 
■ o^ English History," pp. 59-74) contain all that directly bears on our consti- 
tution. Mr. Kemble's *' Codex Diplomaticus /Evi Saxonici," contains a vast 
n^ass of charters, &c., belonging to this period. The lives of Dunstan are 
given by Mabiilon, and in the Bollandist "Acta Sanctorum" for May 19th. 



'Sec. V. 



The brunt of the invasion which at last broke under the Danish 

eader Hasting upon England fell miainly on the brave ealdorman 
hom the king had set over Mercia. After a year's fruitless struggle 
: force the strong position in w^hich Alfred covered Wessex, Hasting 

rft his fastness in the Andredswald and crossed the Thames. But the 
nergy of the Mercian leader was even more formidable than the 
atient strategy of the king. Followed by the Londoners ^thelred 
tormed the Danish camp at Benfleet, followed the host as it rode 

.long Thames to rouse new revolts in Wales, caught it at Buttington, 
nd defeated it with a great slaughter. Fallmg back on Essex, 
lasting repeated his dash upon the west, but ^thelred drove him 
'jm his hold at Chester, and hung on his rear as he retreated to his 

:amp on the Lee. Here Alfred, free from all danger m Wessex, came 
3 his lieutenant's aid, and the capture of the Danish ships by the two 
: Its with which the king barred the river virtually ended the Avar. The 

, anes streamed back from Wales, whither they had retreated, to their 

E 



50 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



I 



old quarters in France, and the new English fleet drove the freebooters 
from the Channel. 

The death of Alfred and -^thelred soon followed these exploits, but 
the fame of Mercia was safe in the hands of its " Lady/' the daughter 
of Alfred, ^thelflaed. During a few years of peace she girded her 
strength for the conquest of the " Five Boroughs/' the rude Danish 
confederacy which had taken the place of the older Mercian kingdom. 
Derby represented the original Mercia in the upper Trent, Lincoln the 
Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English, Stamford the province of 
the Gyrwas — the marshmen of the Fens — Nottingham probably that of 
the Southumbrians. The realm of Penda had become strongly Danish; 
each of the " Boroughs" seems to have been ruled by its earl with his 
separate "host/' within, twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law, 
while a common justice-court existed for the whole confederacy. In 
her attack on their powerful league ^thelflaed abandoned the older 
strategy of battle and raid for that of siege and fortress-building. 
Advancing along the line of Trent, she had fortified Tamworth " and 
Stafford on its head- waters, when a rising in Gwent called her back to 
the Welsh border. Her army stormed Brecknock; and Owain, its 
king, no sooner fled for shelter to the Danes, in whose aid he had 
risen, than ^Ethelflaed at once closed on Derby. The raids of the 
Danes of Middle-England failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her 
prey; and Derby was hardly her own when, turning southward, she 
forced the surrender of Leicester. 

^thelflaed died in the midst of her triumphs, and Eadward at once 
annexed his sister's dominions. The brilliancy of her exploits had as 
yet eclipsed his own, but the son of Alfred was a vigorous and active 
ruler; he had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the Northmen from 
France, summoned no doubt by the cry of distress from their brethren 
in England, and had bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection of 
forts at Hertford and Witham. He now undertook the systematic 
reduction of the Danelagh, as the district occupied by the Danes 
began to be called. South of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a 
tract watered by the Ouse and the Nen — originally the district of a 
tribe known as the South- English, and now, like the Five Boroughs of 
the north, grouped round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and 
Northampton. The reduction of these was followed by that of East- 
Anglia; the Danes of the Fens submitted with Stamford, the Southum- 
brians with Nottingham. Eadward's Mercian troops had already 
seized Manchester, he himself was preparing to complete his conquests, 
when the whole of the north suddenly laid itself at his feet. Not 
merely Northumbria, but the Scots and the Britons of Strathclyde, 
" chose him to father and lord." The submission had probably been 
brought about, like that of the North- Welsh to Alfred, by the pressure 
of mutual feuds, and it was as valueless as theirs. Within a year after 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS, 



SI 



Eadward's death the north was again on fire, .^thelstan, Alfred's 
golden-haired grandson, whom the king had girded as a child with 
a sword set in a golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt, incorporated 
Northumbria with his dominions; then turning westward broke a 
league which had been formed between the North- Welsh and the Scots, 
forced them to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies, and to 
attend his councils. The West- Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a 
like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared 
till then with its English inhabitants. The revolt of the King of the 
Scots, Constantine, was punished by an army which wasted his king- 
dom, while a fleet ravaged its coasts to Caithness, But the revolt only 
heralded the formidable confederacy in which Scotland, Cumberland, 
and the British and Danish chiefs of the west and east rose at the 
appearance of the fleet of Anlaf in the Humber. The king's victory 
at Brunanburh, sung in noblest war-song, seemed the wreck of 
Danish hopes, but the work of conquest was still to be done. On 
iEthelstan's death, the Danelagh rose again in revolt ; and though the 
young King Eadmund won back the Five Boroughs, the peace which 
was negotiated by the two archbishops, Oda and Wulfstan, restored 
the old balance of -Alfred's day, and re-established Watling Street as 
the boundary between Wessex and the Danes. 

The completion of the West- Saxon realm was in fact reserved for 
the hands, not of a king or warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands 
first in the line of ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them 
Lanfranc and Wolsey, and ended in Laud. He is still more remark- 
able in himself, in his own vivid personahty after eight centuries of 
revolution and change. He was born in the little hamlet of Glaston- 
bury, beside Ini's church ; his father, Heorstan, was a man of wealth, 
and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester. It must have 
been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with his scant 
but beautiful hair, caught his charm over animals, his love for "tiie 
vain songs of ancient heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral 
chaunts," which afterwards roused against him the charge of sorcery. 
Thence, too, he may have derived his passionate love of music, and his 
custom of carrying his harp in hand on journey or visit. The wander- 
ing scholars of Ireland had left their books in the monastery of Glas- 
tonbury, as they left them along the Rhine and the Danube ; and 
Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane letters till his 
brain broke down in delirium. His knowledge became famous in the 
neighbourhood and reached the court of the king, but his appearance 
there was the signal for a burst of ill-will among the courtiers, many of 
whom were probably kinsmen of his own. They drove him from the 
king's train, threw him from his horse as he passed through the 
marshes ; and, with the wild passion of their age, trampled him under 
foot in the mire. The outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from : 

E 2 



52 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



his sick-bed a monk. But his devotion took no ascetic turn. His 
nature was sunny, versatile, artistic ; full of strong affections, and 
capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of 
tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in 
address, an artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable 
worker, busy at books, at building, at handicraft. His monastic pro- 
fession seems to have been little more than a vow of celibacy. 
Throughout his manhood he won the affection of women ; he now 
became the chaplain and guide of a woman of high rank, who lived 
only for charity and the entertainment of pilgrims. "He ever clave to 
her, and loved her in wondrous fashion." The wealth of his devotee 
was placed unreservedly at his command ; his sphere began to widen ; 
we see him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, 
harping, painting, designing. One morning a lady summons him to 
her house to design a robe which she is embroidering. As he bends 
with her maidens over their toil, his harp hung upon the wall sounds 
without mortal touch tones which the excited ears around frame into a 
joyous antiphon. The tie which bound him to this scholar-life was 
broken by the death of his patroness, and Dunstan was suddenly called 
to a wider sphere of activity by the accession of Eadmund. But the 
old jealousies revived at his reappearance at court, and counting the 
game lost Dunstan prepared again to withdraw. The king had spent 
the day in the chase ; the red deer which he was pursuing dashed over 
Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only checked itself on the brink of the 
ravine while Eadmund in the bitterness of death was repenting of his 
injustice to Dunstan. He was at once summoned on the king's 
return. " Saddle your horse," said Eadmund, " and ride with me.'' 
The royal train swept over the marshes to his home ; and the king, 
bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the priestly chair as 
Abbot of Glastonbury. 

The hand of the new minister was soon seen in the settlement of the 
north. He seized on the Scots as a balance to the Danes, and secured 
the aid of their king by investing him with the fief of Cumberland. 
Northumbria at once fell into Eadmund's hands, and submitted peace- 
ably at his death to his brother Eadred. A revolt two years later 
enabled Dunstan to iling the head of the Danish resistance, the Arch- 
bishop of York, Wulstan, into prison, and to depose him from his see, 
while the Northumbrian realm sank into an earldom under Oswulf. 
On Eadgar's accession, the minister hastened to complete his work. 
The great earldom was broken into three portions ; Oswulf retained 
the central part between Tees and Tweed which appropriated to itself 
the larger title of the whole ; Deira, revived for Earl Oslac, became our 
Yorkshire. The Scot king, Kenneth, already secured by the grant of 
Cumberland, was now probably bound to the English supremacy by 
the grant of Northern Northumbria, the county between the Forth and 



II 



I.l 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



53 



the Tweed. The grant was more important in its bearing on the 
history of Scotland than on our own. Lothian became the chief abode 
of its new rulers, Edinburgh their capital. The Scot kings were 
absorbed into the mass of their Enghsh subjects, and renounced their 
old Gaelic for the Enghsh tongue. But the settlement of the north 
already indicated the large and statesmanlike course which Dunstan 
was to pursue in the general administration of the realm. He seems 
to have adopted from the beginning a national rather than a West- 
Saxon policy. The charge against his later rule, that he gave too 
much power to the Dane and too much love to strangers, is the best 
proof of the unprovincial temper of his administration. In the code 
which he promulgated he expressly reserved to the north its old Danish 
rights, " with as good laws as they best might choose.^' The resent- 
ment of Wessex was seen in the revolution which followed on the 
death of Eadred. His successor, Eadwig, had contracted an un- 
canonical marriage ; 'he added to the irritation of the prelates by with- 
drawing to his queen's chamber in the midst of the coronation feast. 
Dunstan, commissioned by the bishops and nobles, drew him roughly 
into the hall. The wrath of the boy-king drove the abbot over sea, 
and his whole system wxnt with him.. The kingdom at once broke up ; 
Mercia and Northumbria cast off the rule of Wessex, and chose 
Eadgar, the brother of Eadwig, for their king. 

Dunstan was recalled by the Mercian Witenagemot, and received 
for Eadgar the sees of London and Winchester. When the scandals 
of Eadwig's misgovernment ended two years after in his death, Wessex 
submitted to the king who had been already accepted by the north, and 
Dunstan, now raised to the see of Canterbury, wielded for sixteen 
years as the minister of Eadgar the secular and ecclesiastical powers 
of the realm. Never had England seemed so strong or so peaceful. 
We have already noticed the settlement of the north ; without, a fleet 
cruising round the coast reduced the Danes of Ireland beneath the 
English over-lordship ; eight vassal kings rowed Eadgar after his coro- 
nation in his boat on the Dee. The death of King Eadmund had shown 
the internal disorder of the state ; as the king feasted at Pucklechurch 
a robber, Leofa, whom he had banished, sate himself at the royal board 
and drew on the cupbearer who bade him retire. Eadmund, springing 
to his thegn's aid, seized the robber by his hair and flung him to the 
ground, but Leofa had stabbed the king ere rescue could arrive. The 
stern hand of Dunstan restored justice and order, while his care for 
commerce was shown in the laws which regulated the monetary standard 
and the enactments of common weights and measures for the realm. 
Thanet was ravaged when the wreckers of its coast plundered a trading 
ship from York. But the aims of the Primate-minister reached far 
beyond this outer revival of prosperity and good government. Time 
and the Northern war had dealt rudely with Alfred's hopes ; his 



54 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

The West- 
Saxon 

R^EALM. 

892- 

1016. 



The later 
Consti- 
tution. 



Declitie of 

slavery. 



educational movement had ceased with his death, the clergy had sunk " 
back into worldliness and ignorance, not a single book or translation 
had been added to those which the king had left. Dunstan resumed 
the task, if not in the larger spirit of Alfred, at least in the spirit of a 
great administrator. He had long sympathised with the revival of the 
stricter monasticism which had begun in the Abbey of Clugny, and he 
now devoted himself to its introduction into the English cloisters. He 
found vigorous aid in Oswald and ^thelwold, whom he had promoted 
to the sees of York and Winchester ; a dream showed him a tree of 
wondrous height stretching its branches over Britain, its boughs loaded 
with countless cowls, the topmost twig crowned with a cowl of larger 
size than all. The tree — Dunstan interpreted — was England as it was 
to be, the big cowl ^thelwold. The three prelates pushed the move- 
ment roughly forward, expelling the secular canons from many of the 
cathedrals, and founding forty new abbeys. The abbeys were schools 
as well as monasteries. Dunstan himself while Abbot was famous as 
a teacher, Ethelwold raised Abingdon into a school second only to 
Glastonbury. Abbo, the most notable scholar in Gaul, came from 
Fleury at the Primate's invitation. ; 

After times looked back fondly to " Eadgar's Law," as it was called, 
in other words to the English Constitution as it shaped itself in the 
hands of Eadgafs minister. Peace and change had greatly modified 
the older order which had followed on the English Conquest. Slavery 
was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church. Theodore 
had denied Christian burial to the kidnapper, and prohibited the sale 
of children by their parents after the age of seven. Ecgberht of York 
punished any sale of child or kinsfolk with excommunication. The 
murder of a slave by lord or mistress, though no crime in the eye of 
the State, became a sin for which penance was due to the Church. The 
slave was exempted from toil on Sundays and holydays ; here and 
there he became attached to the soil, and could only be sold with it ; 
sometimes he acquired a plot of ground, and was suffered to purchase 
his own release, -^thelstan gave the slave-class a new rank in the 
realm by extending to it the same principles of mutual responsibility 
for crinie which were the basis of order among the free. The Church 
was far from contenting herself with this gradual elevation ; Wilfrith 
led the way in the work of emancipation by freeing two hundred and 
fifty serfs whom he found attached to his estate at Selsey. Manu- 
mission became frequent in wills, as the clergy taught that such a gift 
-was a boon to the soul of the dead. At the Synod of Calcuith the 
bishops bound themselves to free at their decease all serfs on their 
estates who had been reduced to serfdom by want or crime. Usually 
the slave was set free before the altar or in the church-porch, and the 
Gospel-book bore written on its margins the record of his emancipa- 
tion. Sometimes his lord placed him at the spot where four roads met, 



I'] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS. 



55 



and bade him go whither he would. In the more solemn form of the 
law his master took him by the hand in full shire-meeting, showed him 
open road and door, and gave him the lance and sword of the freeman. 
The slave-trade from EngHsh ports was prohibited by law, but the 
prohibition long remained ineffective. A hundred years later than 
Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was said sometimes to spring 
from breeding slaves for the market. It was not till the reign of the 
first Norman king that the preaching of Wulstan and the influence of 
Lanfranc suppressed the trade in its last stronghold, the port of 
Bristol. 

But the decrease of slavery was more than compensated by the in- 
creasing degradation of the bulk of the people. Much, indeed, of the 
dignity of the free farmer had depended on the contrast of his position 
with that of the slave ; free among his equals, he was lord among his 
serfs. But the change from freedom to villenage, from the freeholder 
who knew no superior but God and the law to the tenant bound to do 
service to his lord, which was annihilating the old English liberty in the 
days of Dunstan, was owing mainly to a change in the character of 
English kingship. The union of the English realms had removed the 
king, as his dominions extended, further and further from his people, 
and clothed him with a mysterious dignity. Religion had told against 
political independence. With Alfred the king becomes ^' the Lord's 
anointed," treason against him is punished with death ; even the bishop, 
once his equal in life-value, sinks to the level of the ealdorman. The 
ealdorman himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, becomes 
from Alfred's time the mere delegate of the king ; his authority is cur- 
tailed by that of the royal reeves, officers despatched to levy the royal 
revenues and administer the royal justice. The older nobility of blood 
died out before the new nobility of the court. From the oldest times 
of Germanic history each chief or king had his war-band, his comrades, 
warriors bound personally to him by their free choice, sworn to fight 
for. him to the death, and avenge his cause as their own. When Cyne- 
v/ulf of Wessex was foully slain at Merton his comrades "ran at once 
to the spot, each as he was ready and as fast as he could," and despising 
all offers of life, fell fighting over the corpse of their lord. The fidelity 
of the war-band was rewarded with grants from the royal domain ; the 
king became their lord or hlaford, "the dispenser of gifts;" the comrade 
became his "servant" or thegn. Personal service with such a lord was 
held not to degrade, but to ennoble ; "dish- thegn," and " bower-thegn," 
and " horse-thegn," became great officers of state. The older nobility 
Yv-ere gradually supplanted by the new ; the thegn advanced with the 
advance of the king ; he absorbed every post of honour, and became 
ealdorman, reeve, bishop, judge ; while the common ground of the mark 
iiow became folk-land in the hands of the king, and was carved out into 
estates for his dependants. 



Sec. VI. 



56 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



With the advance of the thegn fell the freedom of the peasant. The 
principle of personal allegiance embodied in the new nobility widened 
into a theory of general dependence. By Alfred's day it was assumed 
that no man could exist without a lord. The ravages and the long- 
insecurity of the Danish wars aided to drive the free farmer to seek 
protection from the thegn. His freehold was surrendered to be received 
back as a fief, laden with service to its lord. Gradually the " lordless 
man^^ became a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free churl sank into 
the villein, and with his personal freedom went his share in the govern- 
ment of the state. Every freeman was his own legislator, in the meeting 
of the mark, or of the shire, or of the kingdom. In each the prelimi- 
nary discussion rested with the nobler sort, the final decision with alL 
The clash of arms, the "yea" or "nay" of the crowd, were its vote. 
The union of the different kingdoms seemed only to widen and exalt 
the power of the English freeman^ for he was by right a member of the 
"great meeting" as of the smaller, and in that "assembly of the wise" 
lay the rule of the realm. It could elect or depose the king. The 
higher justice, the imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclu- 
sion of treaties, the control of war, the disposal of public lands, the 
appointment of great officers of state, belonged to the Great Assembly. 
But with this power the freeman had really less and less to do. The 
larger the kingdom the greater grew the distance from his home. His 
part in the shire-moot was necessarily less than in his own mark-moot; 
nis share in the general deliberations of the realm dwindled to nothing. 
There was no election of delegates; the freem^an appeared in person or 
not at all. The only relic of the popular character of English govern- 
ment lay at last in the ring of citizens who at London or Winchester 
gathered round the Wise Men and shouted their "ay" or "nay" at the 
election of a king. Practically the national council shrank into a 
gathering of the great officers of Church and State wath the royal 
thegns, and the old English democracy passed into an oligarchy of the 
closest kind. 

It is in this degradation of the class in which its true strength lay, 
that we must look for the cause of the ruin which already hung over 
the West-Saxon realm. Fresh virulence was added to the re?ction 
against the system of Dunstan by his rough treatment of the married 
clergy, and the violent transfer of property which his measures neces- 
sitated. For a time the discontent was quelled by the energy of the 
primate ; seizing his cross, he settled the dispute over Eadgar's suc- 
cessor by the coronation of his son Eadward, and confronted his 
enemies successfully in three assemblies of the Wise. In that of Calne 
the floor of the room gave way, and Dunstan and his friends alons 
remained unhurt. But not even the fame of a miracle sufficed to turn 
the tide. The assassination of Eadward was followed by a West-Saxon 
triumph, and the thegns of the south broke out in "great joy" at the 



I.] 



THE ENGLISH KINGDOiMi 



57 



coronation of his brother ^thelred. Dunstan withdrew to die at 
Canterbury, and with his withdrawal the artificial kingdom which his 
genius had built up fell at once to the ground. All hope of national 
union was ruined by the selfish provincialism of Wessex. The imme- 
diate resumption of Danish hostilities, the practical secession of the 
north, followed naturally on the accession of ^thelred. Within, the 
new king was at war with his clergy and with Mercia, ravaging the see 
of Rochester, and driving ^Elfric, the ealdorman of the former province, 
into temporary banishment. Execrated as traitors by the West-Saxons 
and their king, the Mercian earls seem to have aimed at the restora- 
tion of the old political balance, perhaps at the revival of the yet older 
independence v/hich Wessex had swept away. Weakened by the 
ceaseless attacks of the Danes, ^thelred was forced by their coalition 
with the clerical party under Archbishop Sigeric, the inheritor of the 
policy of Dunstan, to buy a truce from the invaders and to suffer them 
to settle peacefully in the land. A fresh attempt to expel them threw 
^Ifric openly into their arms, and the kingdom of ^thelred shrunk 
into the realms of Wessex and Kent. On these through five years fell 
the full fury of the Danish onset, till peace was again purchased by a 
heavy bribe, and by a promise to afford pay and subsistence to the 
Northmen who chose to settle in Wessex. But the peace only served 
as a screen for the basest treachery. Urged by secret orders from the 
king, the West-Saxons rose on St. Brice's Day and pitilessly massacred 
the Danes scattered defencelessly among them. The tower of St. 
Frideswide, in which those of Oxford had taken refuge, was burnt with 
them to the ground. Gunhild, the sister of their King Swegen, a 
Christian convert, and one of the hostages for the peace, saw husband 
and child butchered before her eyes ere she fell threatening vengeance 
on her murderers. Swegen swore at the news to wrest England from 
^thelred. For four years he marched through the length and breadth 
of Wessex, " lighting his war-beacons as he went" in blazing home- 
stead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to prepare for a 
later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for the realm. 
The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from Wessex 
the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. Canterbury was taken 
and sacked, ^If heah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and there, 
:n default of ransom, brutally slain. The Danes set him in the midst 
of their busting, pelting him with bones and skulls of oxen, till one 
more pitiful than the rest clove his skull with an axe. 

It was not so much the imbecility of ^thelred which paralysed the 
struggle against the Danes as the practical secession of England north 
of the Thames, and when this Northern England passed from inac- 
tivity to active effort the struggle was over in a moment. Northumbria 
and Mercia at last threw themselves with Swegen on Wessex. The 
war was terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly 



Sec. VI. 

The West- 
Saxon 
Realm. 
892- 

loie. 

Mthelred 

the Unready. 

979-1016. 



997-1002, 



Massacre of 

Danes. 

1002. 



SB 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Chap. I. 



Sec. VI. 

The West- 
Saxon 
Realm. 
892- 
1016. 



harried, churches plundered, men slaughtered. But^ with the one 
exception of London, there was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and 
Winchester flung open their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted 
to the Northmen at Bath. Even London was forced at last to give 
way, and ^Ethelred fled over sea to a refuge in Normandy. With the 
flight of the king ends the long struggle of Wessex for supremacy 
over Britain. The task which had baffled the energies of Eadwine and 
Offa proved too hard for the valour of Eadward and the statesmanship 
of Dunstan. Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria remained separate 
political bodies which no efforts of force or policy seemed able to fuse 
into one. 



^ 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



S9 



CHAPTER II. 
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 

1013—1204. 

Section I.— Tlie Danisli Kings. 

[AuthojHfies. — We are still aided by the collections of royal laws and char- 
ters. The English Chronicle is here of great importance ; its various copies 
differ much in tone, &c., from one another, and may to some extent be re- 
garded as distinct works. Florence of Worcester is probably the translator 
of a valuable copy of the Chronicle which has disappeared. The authority 
of the contemporary biographer of Eadward (in Luard's *^ Lives of Eadward 
the Confessor," published by the Master of the Rolls) is ** primary," says 
Mr. Freeman, *'for all matters strictly personal to the King and the whole 
family of Godwine. He is, however, very distinctly not an historian, but a 
biogi-apher, sometimes a laureate." All modern accounts of this reign have 
been superseded by the elaborate history of Mr, Freeman (Norman Con- 
quest, vol. ii. ).] 

Britain had become England in the five hundred years that followed 
the landing of Hengest, and its conquest had ended in the settlement 
of its conquerors, in their conversion to Christianit^y, in the birth of a 
national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political 
order. But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse 
the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation had failed. The 
effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been 
foiled by the resistance of Mercia, that of Mercia by the resistance of 
Wessex. Wessex itself, even under the guidance of great kings and 
statesmen, had no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than 
local independence rose again at the call of the Danes. The tide of 
supremacy rolled in fact backwards and forwards ; now the South won 
lordship over the North, now the North won lordship over the South. 
But w^hatever titles Kings might assume, or however imposing their 
rule might appear, Northumbrian remained apart from West-Saxon, 
Dane from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the 
country roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. 

Through the two hundred years that lie between the flight of 
/Ethelred from England to Normandy and that of John from Nor- 
mandy to England our story is a story of foreign rule. Kings from 
Denmark were succeeded by Kings from Normandy, and these by 



6o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Kings from Anjou. Under Dane, Norman, or Angevin, Englishmen 
were a subject race, conquered and ruled by foreign masters, and 
yet it was in these years of slavery that England really became the 
England that we know. Provincial differences were crushed into 
national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The same pressure 
redressed the wrong which had been done to the fabric of national 
society by the degradation of the free farmer at the close of the pre- 
ceding age into a feudal dependant on his lord. The English lord 
himself was pushed from his place by the barons of the Conquest, 
and sank into the position from which he had thrust the churl. 
The middle class, thus created, was reinforced by the rise of a similar 
class in our towns ; commerce and trade were promoted by the justice 
and policy of the Kings, and with their progress rose the political 
importance of the trader. The boroughs of England, which at the 
opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich 
enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown. Rights of self- 
government, of free speech, of common deliberation, which had passed 
under the later rule of our English Sovereigns from the people at large 
into the hands of its nobles, and from them at the Conquest into the 
hands of the Crown, revived in the charters and councils of the towns. 
A moral revival followed hard on this political development. The 
occupation of every see and abbacy by strangers who could only speak 
to their flocks in an unknown tongue converted religion from a super- 
stition into a reality as it passed from the priest to the people, and 
hermit and friar carried spiritual life home to the heart of the nation 
at large. At the same time the close connection with the Continent 
which necessarily resulted from the foreign origin of our sovereigns 
secured for their realm a free communion with the intellectual and 
artistic life of the world around. The old mental stagnation was at 
once broken up, and art and literature covered England with great 
buildings and busy schools. Time for this varied progress was gained 
by the long peace which England owed to the firm government of her 
Kings, while their political ability gave her administrative order, and 
their judicial reforms built up the fabric of her law. In a word, it is 
to the stern discipline of these two hundred years that we owe not 
merely English wealth and English freedom, but England itself. 

The first of our foreign masters was the Dane. The countries of 
Scandinavia which had so long been the mere starting-points of the 
pirate-bands who had ravaged England and Ireland were now settling 
down into comparative order. It was the aim of Swend to unite them 
in a great Scandinavian Empire, of which England should be the head, 
and this project, interrupted for a time by his death, was resumed with 
yet greater vigour by his son. The fear of the Dane was still great in 
the land, and Cnut had no sooner appeared off the EngHsh coast 
than the wise men of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland joined in 



■II 



II.] 



'NGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



6i 



owning him for their lord, and in discarding again the rule of ^thelrecl, 
who had returned on the death of Swend. With the sole support of 
London and part of Wessex, and for a time that of Mercia, Eadmund' 
Ironside, the son and successor of ^thelred, who passed away at the 
opening of the new contest, struggled for a few months against the 
Danish forces ; but a decisive victory at Assandun and the death of 
his rival left Cnut master of the realm Conqueror as he was, the 
Dane was no foreigner in the sense that the Norman was a foreigner 
after him. His language differed little from the English tongue. He 
brought in no new system of tenure or government. Cnut ruled, in 
fact, not as a conqueror but as a king. The goodwill and tranquiUity 
of England was necessary, in fact, for the success of his larger 
schemes in the North, where the arms of his English subjects aided 
him in uniting Denmark, Norv/ay, and Sweden beneath his sway. 
Dismissing therefore his Danish " host," and retaining only a trained 
body of household troops, the hus-carls, who form the origin of our 
standing army, Cnut boldly relied for support within his realm on the 
justice and good government he secured it. His aim during twenty 
years seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign 
character of his rule, and the bloodshed in which it had begun. The 
change in himself was as startling as the change in his pohcy. When 
he first appears in England, it is as the mere Northman, passionate, 
revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. 
His first acts of government were a series of murders. Eadric of 
Mercia, Avhose aid had given him the crown, was no sooner useless 
than at a sign from Cnut he was felled by an axe-blow in the King's 
presence. A similar assassination removed Eadwig, the brother of 
Eadmund Ironside. Ironside himself was believed to have been 
poisoned by the King's agents, while his children were hunted even 
into Hungary by his ruthless hate. From a mere savage such as 
this Cnut rose abruptly into the wise and temperate king. Stranger 
as he was, he deliberately fell back on the older policy of Dunstan ; 
and while restoring "Eadgar's law," the constitution which secured 
a separate political existence to North and South alike, he acknow- 
ledged no difference between conqueror and conquered, between Dane 
and Englishman. By the erection of four Earldoms, those of Mercia, 
Northumberland, Wessex, and East Angiia, he recognized provincial 
independence, but he drew closer than of old the ties which bound 
the rulers of these great dependencies to the Crown. His attitude 
towards national feeling was yet nobler. The Church had been the 
centre of national resistance to the Dane, but Cnut sought above all 
its friendship. He paid homage to the cause for which ^Elfheah had 
died, by his translation of the Archbishop's body to Canterbury. He 
atoned for his father's ravages by costly gifts to the rehgious houses, 
lie protected English pilgrims against the robber-lords of the Alps, 



62 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 

The 
Danish 
Kings. 
1013- 
1042. 



Bngland 
at peace. 



Tlie Forest 

Laivs, 



and English bishops against the exactions of the Papacy. His love 
for the monks broke out in the song which he composed as he Hstened 
to their chaunt at Ely: "Merrily sung the monks of Ely when Cnut 
King rowed by '' across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their 
abbey. " Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear we these monks 
sing." 

Cnut's letter from Rome to his English subjects marks the grandeur 
of his character, and the noble conception he had formed of kingship. 
" I have vowed to God to lead a right life in all things," wrote the 
King, " to rule justly and piously my realms and subjects, and to 
administer just judgment to all. If heretofore I have done aught 
beyond what was just, through headiness or negligence of youth, I am 
ready, with God's help, to amend it utterly." No royal officer, either 
for fear of the King or for favour of any, is to consent to injustice, 
none is to do wrong to rich or poor, " as they would value my friend- 
ship and their own well-being." He especially denounces unfair 
exactions : " I have no need that money be heaped together for me by 
unjust demands." " I have sent this letter before me," Cnut ends, 
" that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing ; for as 
you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will I spare, to spend 
myself and my toil in what is needful and good for my people." 

Cnuf s greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him 
began the long internal tranquillity which marked the rule of our 
foreign masters. During two hundred years, with the one terrible 
interval of the Norman Conquest, and the long disturbance under 
Stephen, England alone among the kingdoms of Europe enjoyed 
unbroken repose. The wars of her Kings lay far from her shores, 
in France or Normandy, or, as with Cnut, in the more distant lands 
of the North. The stern justice of their government secured order 
within. The absence of internal discontent under Cnut, perhaps too 
the exhaustion of the kingdom after the terrible Danish inroads, 
is proved by its quiet during his frequent periods of absence. Even 
the oppressive Forest Laws, which he was probably the first to enact, 
witness indirectly to the growing wealth and prosperity. The greater 
part of English soil was still utterly uncultivated. A good third 
of the land was probably covered with wood, thicket, or scrub ; an- 
other third consisted of heaths and moor. In both the East and the 
West there were vast tracts of marsh land ; fens nearly one hundred 
miles long severed East Anglia from the midland counties ; sites like 
that of Glastonbury or Athelney were almost inaccessible. The 
bustard roamed over the downs, the beaver still haunted Beverley, 
huntsmen roused the bear in its forest lair, the London craftsmen 
chased the wild boar and the wild ox in the woods of Hampstead, 
while- wolves prowled round the homesteads of the North. Cnufs Law 
proves that peace, and the industry it encouraged, were already telling 



11.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



63 



on this waste. Protection for the "wild deer" could only be thought of 
when stag and bittern were retreating before the face of man, when ! 
the farmer's axe was ringi-ng in the forest, and villages springing up in 
the clearings. 

But the King lost more than his hunting as the forest shrank into 
narrower bounds. He lost power. The common law ran only where 
the plough ran. Marsh and moor and woodland knew no master but 
the King, no law but his absolute will ; and Cnut was the first to 
embody this will in the written form of the " Forest Law." 

His code began a struggle between king and people, which we shall 

jee raging through two centuries of our history, but it began it 

anconsciously. Cnut's one aim was to win the love of his people, and 

dl tradition shows how wonderful was his success. But the Danish 

•ule ended with his death. Denmark and England, parted for a few 

^ears by the accession of his son Harold to the throne of the last, 

v^ere re-united under a second son, Harthacnut ; but the love which 

Tnut's justice had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness of his 

:essors. The long peace sickened men of this fresh outburst of 

bkodshed and violence. "Never was a bloodier deed done in the 

\?r \ since the Danes came," ran the popular song, when Harold's 

-1 seized -Alfred, the brother of Eadmund Ironside, who had 

icked England from Normandy. Every tenth man was killed, the 

: sold for slaves, and Alfred's eyes torn out at Ely. Harthacnut, 

re savage even than his predecessor, dug up his brother's body and 

ag it into a marsh ; while a rising at Worcester against his hus-carls 

is punished by the burning of the town and the pillage of the shire. 

His death was no less brutal than his life ; " he died as he stood at his 

drink in the house of Osgod Clapa at Lambeth." England wearied of 

kings like these : but their crimes helped her to free herself from the 

impossible dream of Cnut. The North, still more barbarous than 

herself, could give her no new element of progress or civilization. It 

was the consciousness of this, and the hatred of such rulers as Harold 

and Harthacnut, which co-operated with the old feelings of reverence 

for the past in calhng back the line of Alfred to the throne. 

Section II.— The English Restoration^ 1042-1066. 

It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history as this that it 
needs the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, the quick perception 
of what is possible, which distinguished the adroit politician whom the 
death of Cnut left supreme in England. Godwine is memorable in our 
history as the first English statesman who was neither king nor priest. 
Originally of obscure origin, his abihty had raised him high in the 
royal favour ; he was allied to the King by marriage, and entrusted by 
him wi^h the earldom of Wessex. In the wars of Scandinavia he 



Sec, I. 



64 



//ISTO.^V OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



rc HAP. 



had shown courage and skill at the head of a body of English troops 
who supported Cnut, but his true field of action lay at home. Shrewd, 
eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine united vigilance, industry, 
and caution with a singular dexterity in the management of men. During 
the troubled years that followed the death of Cnut he had done his 
best to continue his master's policy in securing the internal union of 
England under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her connection 
with the North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut's pohcy had 
become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted 
with the tide of popular feeling which called Eadward to the throne. 

Eadward the son of ^Ethelred had lived from his youth in exile at 
the court of Normandy. A halo of tenderness spread in after- time 
round this last King of the old English stock; legends told of his pious 
simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holiness that 
gained him his name of "Confessor" and enshrined him as a saint in his 
abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in manlier tones of the 
long peace and glories of his reign, how w^arriors and wise councillors 
stood round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton obeyed him. 
His was the one figure that stood out bright against the darkness when 
England lay trodden under foot by Norman conquerors ; and so dear 
became his memory that liberty and independence itself seemed in- 
carnate in his name. Instead of freedom, the subject of William or 
Henry called for the " good laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it 
was as a mere shadow of the past that the exile really returned to the 
throne of Alfred ; there was something shadow-like in the thin form, 
the delicate complexion, the transparent womanly hands that contrasted 
with the blue eyes and golden hair of his race ; and it is almost as a 
shadow that he glides over the political stage. The work of govern- 
ment was done by sterner hands. The King^s weakness left Godwine 
master of the realm, and he ruled firmly and wisely. Abandoning 
with reluctance all interference in Scandinavian politics, he guarded 
England with a fleet which cruised year by year along the coast. 
Within, though the earldoms still remained jealously independent, 
there were signs that a real political unity was being slowly brought 
about; the royal writs "ran," as the phrase went, to the furthest 
borders of Mercia and Northumbria. 

It was indeed the increasing sense of order and law, the growing 
moral consciousness of Englishmen that brought about Godwir-'r fall. 
He alone stood untouched by the religious movement of his diae, by 
the enthusiasm which showed itself in monastic foradations or super- 
stitious piety or a stricter administration of Church ' ': ^ God- 
v/ine was the founder of no rehgious house : he wa5 r, as 
every monk believed, of many. His whole mind n the 
aggrandizement of his family. He had given h .0 the 
Kin^ as wife. His own earldom embraced all !h oi 



11.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



65 



Thames. His son Harold was Earl of East Anglia, while Mercia had 
been dismembered to provide another earldom for his son Swegen. It 
was Swegen^s lawlessness which roused an ill-will that all this greed 
and ambition would hardly have excited. He had seduced the abbess 
of Leominster, had sent her home again with a yet mxOre outrageous 
demand of her hand in marriage, and on the King's refusal to grant 
it had fled from the realm. Godwine's influence secured his pardon, 
but on his very return to seek it Swegen kidnapped and murdered 
his cousin Beorn, who had opposed the reconciliation. He again fled 
to Flanders, and a storm of national indignation followed him over 
sea. The meeting of the Wise men branded him as " nithing," the 
" utterly worthless," yet in a year his father had again wrested a par- 
don from the King and restored him to his earldom. The scandalous 
inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in a struggle which 
soon arose with Eadward himself. The King was, as we have seen, a 
stranger in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home 
and friends of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman tongue. 
He used in Norman fashion a seal for his charters. He set Norman 
favourites in the highest posts of Church and State. Strangers such 
as these, though hostile to the minister, were powerless against God- 
wine's influence and ability, and when at a later time they ventured to 
stand alone against him they fell without a blow. But the general ill- 
will enabled them at this moment to stir Eadward to attack the Earl. 
A quarrel brought the opportunity. On his return from a visit to the 
Court, Eustace Count of Boulogne, the husband of the King's sister, 
demanded quarters for his train in Dover. Strife arose, and many 
both of the burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine's better 
nature withstood Eadward, when the King angrily bade him exact 
vengeance from the town for the affront to his kinsman ; but he claimed 
a fair trial for the townsmen only to find himself arraigned with them 
as a criminal. He at once gathered his forces and marched upon 
Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign favourites ; but 
even in a just quarrel the country was cold in his support. The Earls 
of Mercia and Northumberland united their forces to those of Ead- 
ward, and in a gathering of Wise men at London Swegen's outlawry 
was renewed, while Godwine, declining with his usual prudence a 
"es6 3cmgg;c, witlidrew over sea to Flanders, 

:;at the wrath of the natio-n was appeased by his fall. Great as 
le G'^-fl^ '^"ai^- - faults, he was the one man who now stood between 
'^giand and t' rale of the strangers who flocked to the Court ; and a 
ar had harai^ assed when at the appearance of his fleet in the 
.ames Eadward vas once more forced to yield. The foreign prelates 
id bishops fled ove;*^-ea, outlawed by the same meeting of the Wise 
.r-ea which restorec' odwine to his home. He returned only to die, 
/:'':: direction of iff;:iirs passed quietly to his son. 



Sec. II. 

The 
English 
Restora- 
tion. 
1042- 
1066. 



66 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Ckap. 



HaroliVs 



Harold came to power unfettered by the obstacles which had beset 
his father, and for twelve years he was the actual governor of the 
realm. The courage, the ability, the genius for administration, the 
ambition and subtlety of Godwine were found again in his son. In the 
•internal government of England he followed out his father's policy, 
while avoiding its excesses. Peace was preserved, justice adminis- 
tered, and the realm increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold 
work and embroidery were famous in the markets of Flanders and 
France. But it was a prosperity poor in the nobler elements of 
national activity, and dead to the more vivid influences of spiritual life. 
Literature, which on the Continent was kindling into a new activity, 
died down in England into a few psalters and homilies. The few 
minsters raised by king or earls contrasted strangely with the 
religious enthusiasm which was covering Normandy and the Rhineland 
with stately buildings. National history there was none. Harold's 
temper harmonized singularly with the temper of his times. His 
whole statesmanship seemed to aim at inaction and repose. Dis- 
turbances from without he could crush sternly and rapidly ; his 
militar}^ talents displayed themselves in a campaign against Wales, 
and in the boldness and rapidity with which, arming his troops 
with weapons adapted for mountain conflict, he penetrated to the 
heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country to complete sub- 
mission. But good influences were kept at bay as firmly as evil. The 
Church sank into lethargy, Monasticism was the one religious power 
of the time, and Harold, like his father, hated monks. Stigand, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, was the adherent of an antipope, and the 
highest dignity of the English Church was deliberately kept in a 
state of suspension. No ecclesiastical synod, no Church reform, 
broke the slumbers of its clergy. Abroad Europe was waking to a 
new revival of literature, of art, of religion, but England was all but 
severed from the Continent. Like Godv»^ine, Harold's energy seemed 
to devote itself wholly to self-aggrandizement. As the childless 
Eadward drew to the grave his minister drew closer and closer to the 
throne. One obstacle after another was swept from his path. I'he 
rival house of Mercia fell crushed by the exile of Earl ^Ifga. a revolt 
of the Northumbrians, whether prompted by Harold or not, drove 
Tostig, his brother and most dangerous opponent, to Flanders. His 
aim was attained without a strug-g-le. and the nobles and bishops who 
were gathered round th 
once from it to the elect 



% 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



67 



Section III.— Normandy and tlie NormanS; 912-1066. 

{Authorities, — Dudo of S. Quentin, a verbose and confused writer, has pre- 
served the earUest Norman traditions. His work is abridged and continued by 
WiiHam of Jumieges, a contemporary of the Conqueror, whose work forms the 
base of the "Roman de Rou," composed by Wace in the time of Henry the 
Second. The reUgious movement is best told by Ordericus VitaHs, a Norman 
writer of the twelfth century, gossiping and confused, but full of valuable infor- 
mation. For Lanfranc see **Lanfranci Opera, ed. Giles," and the life in 
Hook's ** Archbishops of Canterbury." For Anselm see the admirable biography 
by the Rev. R. W. Church. The general history of Normandy is toid dif- 
fusely but picturesquely by Sir F. Paigrave, *' Normandy and England," more 
accurately and succinctly by Mr. Freeman, *' History of Norman Conquest," 
vols. i. and ii.] 



But the quiet of Harold's accession was at once broken by news of 
danger from a land which, strange as it seemed then, was soon to 
become almost a part of England itself. A walk through Normandy 
teaches one more of the age of our history which we are about to 
traverse than all the books in the world. The whole story of the Con- 
quest stands written in the stately vault of the minster at Caen which 
still covers the tomb of the Conqueror. The name of each hamlet by 
the roadside has its memories for English ears ; a fragment of castle 
wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny little village preserves the 
name of the Percy. The very look of the country and its people 
seem familiar to us ; the peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the 
build and features of the small English farmer ; the fields about Caen, 
with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the 
very picture of an English country-side. On the windy heights around 
rise the square grey keeps which Normandy handed on to the cliffs 
of Richmond or the banks of Thames, while huge cathedrals lift 
themselves over the red-tiled roof of little market towns, the models 
of the /tately fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of 
-Alfred or Dunstsm. 

Rolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader like Guthrum or Hasting, 
had wrested the land on either side the mouth of Seine from the French 
king, Charles o e Simple, at the moment when Alfred's children, Ead- 
WKrd and ^th. ified, were beginning their conquest of the English 
Danelagh. The > -eaty in which France purchased peace by this cession 
of the coast wa? "lose imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. Rolf, 
like Guthrum, wa^s ized, received the King's daughter in marriage, 

and became his va' -^ ^ the territory which now took the name of 
** the Northman's laxid <x Normandy. But vassalage and the new 

F 2 



68 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



faith sat alike lightly on the Dane. No such ties of blood and speech 
tended to unite the Northman v/ith the French among whom he 
settled along the Seine, as united him to the Englishmen among 
whom he settled along the Humber. William Longsword, the son of 
Rolf, though wavering towards France and Christianity, remained 
Pagan and Dane in heart ; he called in a Danish colony to occupy 
his conquest of the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. 
MichaeFs Mount to the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among 
the Northmen of Bayeux, where the Danish tongue and fashions most 
stubbornly held their own^ A heathen reaction followed his death, 
and the bulk of the Normans, with his boyish successor, fell away for 
the time from Christianity, while new pirate-fleets came swarming up 
the Seine. To the close of the century the whole people are still 
" Pirates " to the French around them, their land the " Pirates' land," 
their Duke the " Pirates' Duke." 

Yet in the end the same forces which merged the Dane in the 
Englishman told even more powerfully on the Dane in France. No 
race has ever shown a greater power of absorbing all the nobler 
characteristics of the peoples with whom they came in contact, or of 
infusing their own energy into them. During the long reign of Duke 
Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longs word, heathen Norman 
pirates became French Christians, and feudal at heart. The old 
Norse language lived only at Bayeux, and in a few names, such as 
those of " dale '' and " bee," the dell and the stream, which marked 
the local features of the country. As the old Norse freedom died 
silently away, the descendants of the pirates becanie feudal nobles and 
the " pirates' land " sank into the most loyal of the fiefs of France. 
The change of manners was accompanied by an even sharper change 
of faith, a change which bound the land where heathendom had fought 
most stubbornly for life more closely than other lands to the cause of 
Christianity and the Church. The Dukes were the first to be touched 
by the new faith, but the religious movement had no sooner spread to 
the people than it was welcomed with an almost passionate fanaticism. 
Every road was crowded with pilgrims. Monasteries rose in every 
forest glade. Herlouin, a knight of Brionne, sought shelter from the 
world in a little valley edged in with woods of ash and elm, through 
which a beck or rivulet (to which his house owed its after-name) runs 
dov/n to the Risle. He was one day busy building an oven with his 
own hands when a stranger greeted him with " God save you ! " " Are 
you a Lombard ? " asked the knight-abbot, struck with the foreign look 
of the man. " I am," he rephed, and praying to be made a monk the 
stranger fell down at the mouth of the oven and kissed Herlouin's feet. 
The Lombard was Lanfranco of Pavia, a scholar of noble family and 
especially skilled in the traditions of the Roman law, who had wan- 
dered across the Alps to found a school at Avranches, and was now 



n.i 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



69 



drawn to a religious life by the fame of Herlouin's sanctity. The reli- 
gious impulse was a real one, but Lanfranc was destined to be known 
rather as a great administrator and statesman than as a saint. His 
teaching raised Bee, in a few years, into the most famous school of 
Christendom : it was in fact the first wave of the intellectual move- 
ment which was spreading from Italy to the ruder countries of the 
West. The whole mental activity of the time seemed concentrated 
in the group of scholars who gathered round him ; the fabric of the 
canon law and of mediaeval scholasticism, with the philosophical 
scepticism which first awoke under its influence, all trace their origin 
to Bee. 

The most famous of these scholars was Anselm of Aosta, an Italian 
like Lanfranc himself, and who w^as soon to succeed him as Prior and 
teacher at Bee. Friends as they were, no two men could be more 
strangely unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the quiet solitude 
of his mountain-valley, a tender-hearted poet-dreamer, with a soul 
pure as the Alpine snov/s above him, and an intelligence keen and 
clear as the mountain air. The whole temper of the man was painted 
in a dream of his youth. It seemed to him as though heaven lay, a 
stately palace, amid the gleaming hill-peaks, while the women reaping 
in the corn-fields of the valley became harvest-maidens of its heavenly 
King. They reaped idly, and Anselm, grieved at their sloth, hastily 
climbed the mountain side to accuse them to their lord. As he 
reached the palace, the King's voice called him to his feet, and he 
poured forth his tale ; then at the royal bidding bread of an unearthly 
whiteness was set before him, and he ate and was refreshed. The dream 
passed with the morning, but the sense of heaven's nearness to earth, 
the fervid loyalty to the service of his Lord, the tender restfulness 
and peace in the Divine presence which it reflected, became the 
life of Anselm. Wandering, like other Italian scholars, to Normandy, 
he became a monk under Lanfranc, and on his teacher's removal to 
higher duties succeeded him in the direction of the Abbey of Bee. No 
teacher has ever thrown a greater spirit of love into his toil. " Force 
your scholars to improve ! " he burst out to another teacher who relied 
on blows and compulsion. " Did you ever see a craftsman fashion a 
fair image out of a golden plate by blows alone ? Does he not now 
gently press it and strike it with his tools, now with wise art yet more 
gently raise and shape it? What do your scholars turn into under 
this ceaseless beating?" "They turn only brutal," was the reply. 
" You have bad luck," was the keen answer, " in a training that only 
turns men into beasts." The worst natures softened before this ten- 
derness and patience. Even the Conqueror, so harsh and terrible 
to others, became another mian, gracious and easy of speech, with 
Anselm. 

But amidst his absorbing cares as a teacher, the Prior of Bee found 



70 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 
Normandy 

AND THE 

Normans. 
912- 
1066. 



The Con- 
QTiests of 
the Nor- 
mans. 



1054-1080. 



1060-T090. 



time for philosophical speculations, to which we owe the great scientific 
inquiries which built up the theolog)^ of the middle ages. His famous 
works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit the idea 
of God from the very nature of the human reason. His passion for 
abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he 
could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till he could 
seize his conception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside 
him. But not even a fever of intense thought such as this could 
draw Anselm's heart from its passionate tenderness and love. Sick 
monks in the infirmary could relish no drink save the juice which 
his hand had squeezed for them from the grape-bunch. In the later 
days of his archbishoprick a hare chased by the hounds took refuge 
under his horse, and his voice grew loud as he forbade a huntsman to 
stir in the chase, while the creature darted off again to the woods. 
Even the greed of lands for the Church to which so many religious men 
yielded found its characteristic rebuke, as the battling lawyers saw 
Anselm quietly close his eyes in court, and go peacefully to sleep. 



Section IV.—The Conqueror, 104-2-1066 

{Authorities. — Primarily the "Gesta Willelmi " of his chaplain, Wilham of 
Poitiers, a violent partisan of the Duke. Wilham of Jumieges is here a contem- 
porary, and of great value. Orderic and Wace, with the other rhyming chronicle 
of Benvil de Saint Maur, come in the second place. For the invasion and 
Senlac we have, in addition, the contemporary ** Carmen de^Bello Hastingensi," 
by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the invaluable pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry. 
The EngHsh accounts are most meagre. The invasion and battle of Senlac 
are the subject of Mr. Freeman's third volume (Hist, of Norman Conquest).] 



It was not this new fervour of faith only which drove Norman pilgrims 
in flocks to the shrines of Italy and the Holy Land. The old Norse 
spirit of adventure turned the pilgrims into Crusaders, and the flower 
of Norman knighthood, impatient of the stern rule of their Dukes, 
followed Roger de Toesny against the Moslem of Spain, or enlisted 
under the banner of the Greeks in their war with the Arabs who had 
conquered Sicily. -The Crusaders became conquerors under Robert 
Guiscard, a knight who had left his home in the Cotentin with a 
single follower, but whose valour and wisdom soon placed him at the 
head of his fellow-soldiers in Italy. Attacking the Greeks, whom they 
had hitherto served, the Norman knights wrested Apulia from them in 
an overthrow at Cannse, Guiscard himself led them to the conquest of 
Calabria and the great trading cities of the coast, while thirty years of 
warfare gave Sicily to the followers of his brother Roger. The two 
conquests were united under a line of princes to whose munificence art 



IT.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



71 



owes the splendour of Palermo and Monreale, and literature the first 
outburst of Italian song. Normandy, still seething with vigorous life, 
was stirred to greed and enterprise by this plunder of the South, and 
the rumour of Guiscard^s exploits roused into more ardent life the 
daring ambition of its Duke. 

WilHam the Great, as men of his own day styled him, William the 
Conqueror, as by one event he stamped himself on our history, was 
now Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, 
his large and patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts 
him out of the petty incidents of his age, had still to be disclosed. 
But there never was a moment from his boyhood when he was not 
among the greatest of men. His life was one long mastering of difficulty 
after difficulty. The shame of his birth rem.ained in his name of " the 
Bastard." His father, Duke Robert, had seen Arietta, the daughter of 
a tanner of the town, washing her linen in the little brook beneath the 
cliff of Falaise, and loving her had made her the mother of his boy. 
Robert's departure on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left 
William a child-ruler among the most turbulent baronage in Christen- 
dom, and treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to manhood. 
Disorder broke at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat 
at Valognes by the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, in which 
the Norse temper and lawlessness lingered longest, William had onl}/ 
time to dash through the fords of Vire with the rebels in his track. A 
fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-^s-dunes, to the south- 
eastward of Caen, left him master of the Duchy, and the old Scan- 
dinavian Normandy yielded for ever to the new civilization which 
streamed in with French alliances and the French tongue. William 
was himself a type of the transition. In the young Duke's character 
the old world mingled strangely with the new, the pirate jostled roughly 
with the statesman. William was the most terrible, as he was the last 
outcome of the Northern race. The very spirit of the sea-wolves who 
had so long lived on the pillage of the world seemed embodied in his 
gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his 
desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. 
" No knight under heaven," his enemies confessed, " was WilKam's 
peer." Boy as he was, horse and man went down before his lance 
at Val-^s-dunes. All the gaiety of his fierce nature broke out in the 
chivalrous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with 
but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over the disputed ground, 
hawk on fist, as though war and the chase were one. No man could 
bend his bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring of English 
warriors to the foot of the Standard. He rose to his greatest heights 
in moments when other men despaired. His voice rang out like a 
trumpet to rally his soldiers as they fled before the first English charge 
at Senlac. In his winter march on Chester he dismounted to put 



72 



jriSTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



himself at the head of his fainting troops, and helped with his own 
hands to clear a road through the snowdrifts. With the Norse 
daring broke out the Norse cruelty. His vengeance had no touch 
of human pity. When the revolted townsmen of Alengon hung out 
raw hides along their walls in scorn of the baseness of his birth, with 
cries of " Work for the Tanner ! " William tore out the eyes of 
the prisoners he had taken, cut off their hands and feet, and flung 
them into the town. At the close of his greatest victory he refused 
Harold's body a grave. Thousands of Hampshire peasants were 
driven from their homes to make him a hunting-ground, and his 
harrying of Northumbria left the north of England a waste for a 
hundred years. There is a grim, ruthless ring about his very jests. In 
his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk, 
and at the sickness which confined him to his bed at Rouen. " King 
William has as long a lying-in," laughed his enemy, "as a woman 
behind her curtains !" "When I get up," swore William, "I will go 
to mass in Philip's land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. 
I will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they 
be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make." At harvest tide, 
town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border fulfilled 
the Conqueror's vow. There is the same savage temper in the loneli- 
ness of his life. He recked little of men's love or hate. His grim 
look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread terror 
through . his court. " Stark man he was, and great awe men had of 
hi-m," was the comment of his subjects on his death. His graciousness 
to Anselm only brought out into stronger relief the general harshness 
of his tone. His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he, and 
no man dared speak to him," when the news reached him of Harold's 
accession to the throne. He fouad society only when he passed from 
the palace to the loneliness of the woods. " He loved the wild deer as 
though he had been their father. Whosoever should slay hart or hind 
man should blind him.'' Death itself took its colour from the savage 
solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath left him, 
and the Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor. 

It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere 
Norseman into the greatest general and statesman of his time. The 
growth of the Norman power was jealously watched by Geoffry Martel, 
the Count of Anjou, and his influence succeeded in converting France 
from friend to foe. The danger changed William at once from the 
chivalrous knight-errant of Val-es-dunes into a wary strategist. As 
the French army crossed the border he hung cautiously on its flanks, 
till a division which had encamped in the little town of Mortemer had 
been surprised and cut to pieces by his soldiers. A second division 
was still held at bay by the Duke himself, when Roger de Toesny, 
climbing up into a tree, shouted to them the news of their comrades' 



n-l 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



73 



The 

CoNQUEPvCR. 

104.2- 
1066. 



fall. " Up, up, Frenchmen ! you sleep too long : go bury your friends 
that lie slain at Mortemer." A second and more formxidable invasion four 
years later was met with the same cautious strategy. Wilham hung 
on the Frenchmen's flank, looking coolly on while town and abbey 
were plundered, the Bessin ravaged, Caen sacked, and the invaders 
prepared to cross the Dive and carry fire and sword into the rich land 
of Lisieux. But only half the army was over the river when the Duke 
fell suddenly upon its rear. The fight raged till the rising of the tide 
cut the French forces, as William had foreseen, hopelessly in two. 
Huddled together on a narrow causeway, swept by the Norman arrows, 
knights, footmen, and baggage train were involved in the same ruin. 
Not a man escaped, and the French king, who had been forced to look 
on helplessly from the opposite bank, fled home to die. The death of 
Geoffry Martel left William without a rival among the princes of 
France. Maine, the border land between Normandy and Angevin, 
and which had for the last ten years been held by Anjou, submitted 
without a struggle to his rule. Brittany, which had joined the league 
of his foes, was reduced to submission by a single march. 

All this activity abroad was far from distracting the Duke's attention 
from Normandy itself. It was hard to secure peace and order in a 
land filled with turbulent robber-lords. "The Norman must be trod- 
den down and kept under foot," said one of their poets, " and he who 
bridles them may use them at his need." William " could never love a 
robber." His stern protection of trader and peasant roused the baron- 
age through his first ten years to incessant revolt. His very kinsfolk 
headed the discontent, and summoned the French King to their aid. 
But the victories of Mortemer and Varaville left the rebels at his 
mercy. Some rotted in his dungeons, for " stark " as he was the Duke 
abhorred bloodshed ; some were driven into exile, and joined the 
conquerors of Apulia and Sicily. The land settled down into peace 
and order, and William turned to the reform of the Church. Malger, 
the Archbishop of Rouen, a mere hunting and feasting prelate, was 
summarily deposed, and his place filled by Maurilius, a French eccle,- 
siastic of piety and learning. Frequent councils under the Duke's 
guidance amended the morals of the clergy. The school of Bee, as 
we have seen, had become a centre of education ; and Wilham, with 
the keen insight into men which formed so marked a feature in his 
genius, selected its Prior as his chief adviser. In a strife with the 
Papacy which the Duke had provoked by his marriage with Matilda 
of Flanders, Lanfranc had shown himself an ardent partisan of Rome, 
and his opposition had been punished by a sentence of banishment. 
The Prior set out on a lame horse, the only one his house could aiford, 
and was overtaken by the Duke, impatient that he should quit Nor- 
mandy. " Give m.e a better horse and I shall go the quicker," replied 
the imperturbable Lombard, and the Duke's wrath passed into laughter 



74 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



and good-will. From that hour Lanfranc became his minister and 
counsellor, whether for the affairs of the Church or the more daring 
schemes of foreign oppression which were opened up to him by the 
position of England. 

Quarrel after quarrel had for half a century been drawing the two coun- 
tries nearer together. At the close of the reign of Richard the Fearless 
the Danish descents upon the English coast had found support in 
Normandy, and their fleet had wintered in her ports. It was to revenge 
these attacks that Ethelred had despatched a fleet across the Channel 
to ravage the Cotentin, but the fleet was repulsed and the strife 
appeased by ^thelred's marriage with Emma, a sister of Richard the 
Good. Ethelred with his children found shelter in Normandy from 
the Danish kings, and, if Norman accounts are to be trusted, contrary 
winds alone prevented a Norman fleet from undertaking their restora- 
tion. The peaceful recall of Eadward to the throne seemed to open 
England to Norm^an ambition, and Godwine was no sooner banished 
than Duke William appeared at the English court, and received, as 
he afterwards asserted, a promise of succession to its throne from the 
King. Such a promise, unconfirmed by the national assembly of the 
Wise men, was utterly valueless, and for the moment Godwine's recall 
put an end to William's hopes. They were revived by a storm which 
threw Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the French coast, and 
forced him to swear on the relics of the saint to support the Duke's 
claim as the price of his own return to England : but the news of the 
King's death was at once followed by that of Harold's accession, and 
after a burst of furious passion the Duke prepared to enforce his claim 
by arms. William did not in any strict sense claim the crown. He 
claimed simply the right which he afterwards used, when his sword 
had won it, of presenting himself for election by the nation, and he 
believed himself entitled so to present himself by the direct com- 
mendation of the Confessor. The actual election of Harold, which 
stood in his way, hurried as it was, he did not recognize as valid. 
But with this constitutional claim was inextricably mingled hi? re- 
sentment at the private wrong which Harold had done Jiim, and a 
resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as unti'ue 
to his oath. The wrong-doing of Harold furnished indeed no just 
ground for shedding the blood of Englishmen, but even in mbdern 
times we have not learnt practically to dissociate the private acts 
of rulers from the public responsibihty of their subjects. 

The difficulties in the way of his enterprise were indeed enormous. 
He could reckon on no support within England itself. At home he 
had to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage ; to gather a 
motley host from every quarter of France, and to keep it together 
for months ; to create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build, 
to launch, to man the vessels, and to find time amidst all this for the 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



75 



common business of government, for negotiations with Denmark and i 
the Empire, with France, Brittany, and Anjou, with Flanders and with 
Rome. His rivaFs difficulties were hardly less than his own. Harold 
was threatened with invasion by his brother Tostig, who had taken 
refuge in Norway, as well as by William; and the fleet and army he 
had gathered lay watching for months along the coast. His one 
standing force was his body of hus-carls, but their numbers only 
enabled them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the other hand, 
the Land-Fyrd, or general levy of fighting men, was a body easy 
to raise for any single encounter, but hard to keep together. To 
assemble such a force was to bring labour to a standstill. The men 
gathered under the King's standard were the farmers and ploughmen 
. of their fields. The ships were the fishing-vessels of the coast. In 
September the task of holding them together became impossible, but 
their dispersion had hardly taken place when the two clouds which 
had so long been gathering burst at once upon the realm. A change 
of wind released the landlocked armament of William ; but before 
changing, the wind which prisoned the Duke had flung the host of 
Harald Hardrada, the King of Norway, whose aid lostig had en- 
listed, on the coast of his old earldom of Yorkshire. The King 
hastened with his household troops to the spot, and repulsed the 
invaders in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, in the neigh- 
bourhood of York, but ere he could hurry back to London the Norman 
host had crossed the sea, and Wilham, who had anchored on the 28th 
off the shingly coast of Pevensey, was ravaging the coast to bring 
his rival to an engagement. To march inland would ha>ve been to 
cut himself off from his fleet, his one base of operations and only hope 
in case of defeat. His merciless ravages succeeded, as they were in- 
tended, in drawing Harold to an engagement ; but the King judiciously 
refused to attack with the forces he had hastily summoned to his 
banner. If he was forced to give battle, he resolved to give it on 
ground he had himself chosen, and, advancing near enough to the 
coast lo check William's ravages, he entrenched himself on the hill of 
Senlac, a lov/ spur of the Sussex Downs, near Hastings, in a position 
which covered London, and forced the Norman army to concentrate. 
With a host subsisting by pillage, to concentrate is to starve, and 
no alternative was left to William but a decisive victory or ruin. 

Along the higher ground that leads from Hastings the Duke kd his 
men in the dim dawn of an October morning to the mound of Telham. 
It was from this point that the Normans saw the host of the English 
gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on the height of 
Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right ; on the left, the most ex- 
posed part of the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold, men 
in full armour and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden 
Dragon of Wessex and the standard of the King. The rest of the 



Sec. IV. 



76 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



ground was covered by the thick masses of half-armed rustics who had 
flocked at Harold's summons to the fight with the stranger. It was 
against the centre of this formidable position that William arrayed his 
Norman knighthood, while the mercenary forces he had gathered in 
France and Brittany were ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge 
of the Norman foot opened the battle ; in front rode the minstrel Taille- , 
fer, tossing his sword in the air and catching it again while he chaunted ' 
the song of Roland. He was the first of the host who struck a blow, 
and he was the first to fall. The charge broke vainly on the stout 
stockade behind which the English warriors plied axe and javelin 
with fierce cries of " Out, out," and the repulse of the Norman footmen 
was followed by the repulse of the Norman horse. Again and again the 
Duke rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All the fury of fight 
that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong valour that had 
spurred him over the slopes of Val-^s-dunes, mingled that day with 
the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible faculty 
of resource which had shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton 
troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder, 
and a cry arose, as the panic spread through the army, that the Duke 
was slain. " I live." shouted William, as he tore off his helmet, " and 
by God's help will conquer yet." Maddened by repulse, the Duke 
spurred right at the standard ; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down 
Gyrth, the King's brother, and stretched Leofwine, a second of God- 
wine's sons, beside him ; again dismounted, a blow from his hand 
hurled to the ground an unmannerly rider who would not lend him his 
steed. Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle he turned the flight 
he had arrested into the means of victory. Broken as the stockade 
was by his desperate onset, the shield-wall of the warriors behind it 
still held the Normans at bay, when William by a feint of flight drew 
a part of the English force from their post of vantage. Turning on 
his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to pieces, broke through 
the abandoned line, and was master of the central plateau, while 
French and Bretons made good their ascent on either flank. At three 
the hill seemed won, at six the fight still raged around the standard, 
where Harold's hus-carls stood stubbornly at bay on the spot marked 
afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey. An order from the 
Duke at last brought his archers to the front, and their arrow-flight 
told heavily on the dense masses crowded around the King. As the 
sun went down, a shaft pierced Harold's right eye ; he fell between the 
royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melee over his 
corpse. While night covered the flight of the English, the Conqueror 
pitched his tent on the very spot where his rival had fallen, and " sate 
down to eat and drink among the dead." 

Securing Romney and Dover, the Duke marched slowly by Canter- 
bury upon London. Faction and intrigue were in reality doing his 



II. 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



work for him. Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on the field 
of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to contest the 
crown ; while of the old royal line there remained but a single boy, 
Eadgar the ^thehng, son of the eldest of Eadmund Ironside's children, 
who had fled, as we have seen, before Cnut's persecution as far as 
Hungary for shelter. Boy as he was, he was chosen King, but the 
choice gave little strength to the national cause. The widow of the 
Confessor surrendered Winchester to the Duke. The bishops gathered 
at London inchned to submission. The citizens themselves faltered 
as William, passing by their walls, gave Southwark to the flames. 
The throne of the boy-king really rested for support on the Earls of 
Mercia and Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere ; and William, crossing 
the Thames at Wallingford and marching into Hertfordshire, threat- 
ened to cut them off from their earldoms. The masterly movement 
brought about an instant submission. Eadwine and Morkere retreated 
hastily home from London, and the city gave way at once. Eadgar 
himself was at the head of the deputation who came to offer the crown 
to the Norman Duke ; " they bowed to him," says the English 
annahst, pathetically, "for need." They bowed to the Norman as 
they had bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the 
spirit of Cnut. London indeed was secured by the erection of a 
fortress which afterwards grew into the Tower, but William desired to 
reign not as a conqueror but as a lawful king. He received the crown 
at Westminster from the hands of Archbishop Ealdred, amidst shouts 
of "Yea, Yea," from his new English subjects. Fines from the greater 
landowners atoned for a resistance which was now counted as rebellion ; 
but with this exception every measure of the new sovereign indicated 
his desire of ruling as a successor of Eadward or Alfred. As yet, 
indeed, the greater part of England remained quietly aloof from him, 
and he can hardly be said to have been recognized as king by North- 
umberland or the greater part of Mercia. But to the east of a line 
which stretched from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was unquestioned, 
and over this portion he ruled as an English king. His soldiers 
were kept in strict order. No change was made in law or custom. 
The privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ which still 
remains, the most venerable of its m^uniments, among the city's 
archives. Peace and order were restored. William even attempted, 
though in vain, to learn the English tongue, that he might personally 
administer justice to the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so 
tranquil that only a few months had passed after the battle of Senlac 
v/hen WilHam, leaving England in charge of his brother, Odo Bishop 
of Bayeux, and his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, returned for a 
while to Normandy. 



78 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Section V.— The Norman Conquest^ 1068--1071. 

{Authorities. — The Norman writers as before, Orderic being particularly 
valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Worcester are the pri- 
mary English authorities (for the so-called '* Ingulf of Croyland " is a forgery 
of the 14th century). Domesday Book is of course indispensable for the Norman 
settlement ; the introduction to it by Sir Henry Ellis gives a brief account of 
its chief results. Among secondary authorities Simeon of Durham is useful for 
Northern matters, and William of Malmesbury valuable from his remarkable 
combination of Norman and English feeling. The Norman Constitution is 
described at length by Lingard, but best studied in the documents and prefaces 
of Professor Stubbs' *' Documents illustrative, &c." The " Anglia Judaica" of 
Toovey gives some account of the Jewish colonies. For the history as a 
whole, see Mr. Freeman's '^Norman Conquest," vol. iv.] 



It is not to his victory at Senlac, but to the struggle which followed 
his return from Normandy, that William owes his. title of the 
" Conqueror." During his absence Bishop Odo's tyranny had forced 
the Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne, while 
the Welsh princes supported a similar rising against Norman oppres- 
sion in the west. But as yet the eastern counties trusted and held firmly 
by the King; Dover was saved, and the discontented fled over the sea 
to seek refuge in lands as distant as Constantinople, where we find 
Englishmen composing great part of the Imperial body-guard. A 
league of the western towns, headed by Exeter, threatened to prove a 
more serious danger, but William found an English force to suppress 
It, and it was at the head of an English army that he advan-ced upon 
Mercia and the North. His march through Central England reduced 
Eadwine and Morkere to submission, and a second rising ended in 
the occupation of York. 

England now lay helpless at his feet, but William^s position as an 
English King remained unaffected. He became the Conqueror only 
in face of a national revolt. The signal for it came from without. 
Swegen, the King of Denmark, had for two years been preparing 
to dispute England with the Norman, and on the appearance of his 
fleet in the Humber the nation rose as one man. Eadgar the ^theling, 
with a band of noble exiles who had taken refuge in Scotland, 
joined the Danes ; in the west the men of Devon, Somerset, and 
Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montaeute, while the 
new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled the rising along 
the Welsh border. So ably had the revolt been planned that even 
William was taken by surprise. The news of the loss of York and 
of the slaughter of three thousand Normans who formed its garrison j 
reached him as he was hunting in the Forest of Dean, and in a 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



79 



ivild outburst of wrath the King swore by " the splendour of God " to 
avenge himself on Northumbria. But wrath went hand in hand 
with the coolest statesmanship. Wilham saw clearly that the centre 
of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and pushing rapidly to the 
Humber with a handful of horsemen, he purchased by a heavy bribe 
its inactivity and withdrawal. Then leaving York to the last, Wil- 
liam turned rapidly westward with the troops which gathered round 
nim, and swept the Welsh marshes as far as Shrewsbury. Exeter 
had been already relieved by William Fitz-Osbern, and the King 
was free to fulfil his oath of revenge on the North. After a long 
delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he entered York, and 
ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees with fire and sword. 
Town and village were harried and burnt, their mhabitants slam or 
driven over the Scotch border. The coast was especially wasted, that 
no hold might remain for any future invasion of the Danes. Hai-\'est, 
cattle, the very implements of husbandry were so mercilessly destroyed, 
that the famine which followed is said to have swept off more than a 
hundred thousand victims, while half a century later the land still lay 
bare of culture and deserted of men for sixty miles northward of York. 
The work of vengeance was no sooner over than William led his 
army back from the Tees to York, and thence to Chester and the 
West. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character so memor- 
ably as in this terrible march. The winter was severe, the roads 
choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents ; provisions failed, and 
the army, drenched with rain and forced to consume its horses for 
•food, broke out into open mutiny at the order to advance across the 
bleak country that separates Yorkshire from the West. The merce- 
naries from Anjou and Brittany demanded their release from service, 
and William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot, at the head of 
the troops which remained faithful, the King forced his way by paths 
inaccessible to horses, often aiding his men with his own hands 
to clear the road. The last hopes of the English ceased on his 
arrival at Chester ; the King remained undisputed master of the 
conquered country, and busied himself in the erection of numerous 
castles which were henceforth to hold it in subjection. Two years 
passed quietly ere the last act of the conquest was reached. By 
the withdrawal of the Dane the hopes of England rested wholly 
on the aid it looked for from Scotland, where Eadgar the ^theling 
had taken refuge, and where his sister Margaret had become the 
wife of King Malcolm. It was probably Malcolm's instigation which 
roused Eadwine and Morkere to a renewed revolt, which was at 
once foiled by the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an 
obscure skirmish on the Scotch border, while Morkere found refu^-e 
for a time in the marshes of the eastern counties, where a desperate 
band ot patriots had gathered round the outlaw, Hereward. Nowhere 



8o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



had William found a more obstinate resistance, but in spite of natural 
obstacles he drove a causeway two miles long across the fens, and 
the last hopes of England died in the surrender of Ely. Malcolm 
alone held out till the Conqueror summoned the whole host of the 
crown, and crossing the Lowlands and the Forth penetrated into the 
heart of Scotland. He had reached the Tay when the King's resist- 
ance gave way, and Malcolm appeared in the English camp and swore 
fealty at William's feet. 

The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed 
William's position. He no longer held the land merely as elected king, 
he added to his elective right the right of conquest. The system of 
government which he originated was, in fact, the result of the double 
character of his power. It represented neither the purely feudal sys- 
tem of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty. 
More truly perhaps it may be said to have represented both. As the 
successor of Eadward, William retained the judicial and administrative 
organization of the older English realm. As the conqueror of England, 
he introduced the military organization of feudalism, so far as was 
necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground 
was already prepared for such an organization ; we have seen the 
beginnings of English feudalism in the warriors, the " companions " or 
" thegns," who were personally attached to the King's war-band, and 
received estates from the royal domain in reward for their personal 
service. Under the English kings this feudal distribution of estates had 
greatly increased, the bulk of the nobles having followed the Royal 
example and united their tenants to themselves by a similar process 
of subinfeudation. On the other hand, the pure freeholders, the class 
which formed the basis of the original English society, had been gra- 
dually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the class above 
them, but still more through the incessant wars and invasions which 
drove them to seek protectors among the thegns, even at the cost of in- 
dependence. Feudalism, in fact, was superseding the older freedom in 
England even before the reign of William, as it had already superseded 
it in Germany or France. But the tendency was quickened and inten- 
sified by the Conquest ; the desperate and universal resistance of his 
English subjects forced William to hold by the sword what the sword 
had won, and an army strong enough to crush at any moment a 
national revolt was necessary for the preservation of his throne. Such 
an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of the soil. 
The failure of the English risings cleared the v/ay for its establishment ; 
the greater part of the higher nobility had fallen in battle or fled into 
exile, while the lower thegnhood had either forfeited the whole of their 
lands or redeemed a portion of them by the surrender of the rest. We 
see the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which 
William was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two 



n.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN J^INGS. 



Sr 



hundred manors in Kent, with an equal number elsewhere, rewarded 
the services of his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to the 
royal ministers, Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery, or to barons like the 
Mowbrays, the Warrennes, and the Clares. But the poorest soldier 
of fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest Norman rose 
to wealth and power in the new dominion of his Duke. Great or 
small, however, each estate thus held from the crown was held by its 
tenant on condition of military service at the royal call ; and when 
the larger holdings were divided by their owners, as was commonly 
the case, into smaller sub-tenancies, the under-tenants were bound 
by the same conditions of service to their lord. " Hear, my lord," 
swore the feudal dependant, as kneeling without arms and bare- 
headed he placed his hands within those of his superior. " I become 
liege man of yours for life and limb and earthly regard, and I will keep 
faith and loyalty to you for life and death, God help me." The kiss of 
his lord invested him with land or "fief" to descend to him and his 
heirs for ever. A whole army was by this means camped upon the 
soil, and the King^s summons could at any moment gather sixty 
thousand knights to the royal standard. 

Such a force, however, effective as it was against the conquered, 
was hardly less fonnidable to the crown itself. William found himself 
fronted in his new realm by the feudal baronage whom he had so 
hardly subdued to his will in Normandy, nobles impatient of law, and 
aiming at an hereditary military and judicial power within their own 
manors independent of the King. The genius of the Conqueror is 
shown in his quick discernment of this danger, and in the skill with 
which he met it. He availed himself of the old legal constitution of 
the country to hold justice firmly in his own hands. He retained the 
local courts of the hundred and the shire, where every freeman had a 
place, v/hile he subjected all to the jurisdiction of the King's court, 
which towards the close of the earlier English monarchy had assumed 
the right of hearing appeals and of calling up cases from any quarter to 
its bar. The authority of the crown was maintained by the abolition of 
the great earldoms which had overshadowed it, those of Wessex, Mercia, 
and Northumberland, and by the royal nomination of sheriffs for the 
government of the shires. The estates of the great nobles, large as 
they were, were scattered over the country in a way which made 
union between the landowners, or the hereditary attachment of great 
masses of vassals to a separate lord, equally impossible. By a usage 
peculiar to England, each sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty 
to his lord, swore fealty directly to the crown. The feudal obligations, 
too, the rights and dues owing from each estate to the King, were 
enforced with remarkable strictness. Each tenant was bound to 
appear if needful thrice a year at the royal court, to pay a heavy fine 
or rent on succession to his estate, to contribute an "aid^' in money 



82 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, [Chap, 



in case of the King's capture in war, or the knighthood of the King's 
eldest son, or the marriage of his eldest daughter. An heir who was 
still a minor passed into the crown's wardship, and all profit from his 
estate went for the time to the King. If the estate devolved upon an 
heiress, her hand was at the King^s disposal, and was generally sold 
to the highest bidder. All manors, too, were burthened with their own 
"customs," or special dues to the crown, and it was for the purpose 
of ascertaining and recording these that William sent into each county 
the commissioners whose inquiries are preserved in Domesday Book. 
A jury empanelled in each hundred declared on oath the extent and 
nature of each estate, the names, numbers, condition of its inhabitants, 
its value before and after the Conquest, and the sums due from it to 
the crown. 

William found another check on the aggressive spirit of the feudal 
baronage in his organization of the Church. One of his earliest acts 
was to summon Lanfranc from Normandy to aid him in its reform ; 
and the deposition of Stigand, which raised Lanfranc to the see of 
Canterbury, was followed by the removal of most of the English 
prelates and abbots, and by the appointment of Norman ecclesiastics 
in their place. The synods of the new Archbishop did much to restore 
discipline, and William's own efforts were no doubt directed by a real 
desire for the religious improvement of his realm. " In choosing 
abbots and bishops," says a contemporary, "he considered not so 
much men's riches or power as their holiness and wisdom. He called 
together bishops and abbots and otherwise counsellors in any vacancy, 
and by their advice inquired very carefully who was the best and 
wisest man, as well in divine things as in worldly, to rule the church of 
God." But honest as they were, the King's reforms tended directly to 
the increase of the royal power. The new bishops and abbots were 
cut off by their foreign origin from the flocks they ruled, while their 
popular influence was lessened by the removal of ecclesiastical cases 
from the hundred court, where till now the bishop had sat side by side 
with the civil magistrate, to the separate court of the bishop himself. 
Pregnant as this measure was with future trouble to the crown, it must 
for the time have furthered the isolation of the prelates, and fixed them 
into a position of dependence en the King, which was enhanced by the 
strictness with which William enforced his supremacy over the Church. 
Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron. No excommunication 
could be issued without the King's licence. No synod could legislate 
without his previous assent and subsequent confirmation of its decrees. 
No papal letters could be received within the realm save by his 
permission. William was indeed the one ruler of his time who dared 
firmly to repudiate the claims which were now beginning to be put 
forward by the court of Rome. When Gregory VI L called on him to 
do fealty for his realm, the King sternly refused to admit the claim; 



11.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



83 



" Fealty I have never willed to do, nor do I will to do it now. I have 
never promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to yours." 
But the greatest safeguard of the crown lay in the wealth and 
personal power of the kings. Extensive as had been his grants to 
noble and soldier, William remained the greatest landowner in his 
realm. His rigid exaction of feudal dues added wealth to the great 
Hoard at Winchester, which had been begun by the spoil of the 
conquered. But William found a more ready source of revenue in the 
settlement of the Jewish traders, who followed him from Normandy, 
and who were enabled by the royal protection to establish themselves 
in separate quarters or "Jewries " of the chief towns of England. The 
Jew had no right or citizenship in the land ; the Jewry in which he 
lived was, like the King's forest, exempt from the common law. He 
was simply the King's chattel, and his life and goods were absolutely 
at the King^s mercy. But he was too valuable a possession to be 
lightly thrown away. A royal justiciary secured law to the Jewish 
merchant, who had no standing-ground in the local courts ; his bonds 
were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal palace at West- 
minster, which from their Hebrew name of " Starrs " gained the title of 
the Star Chamber ; he was protected against the popular hatred in the 
free exercise of his religion, and allowed to erect synagogues and to 
direct his own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief Rabbi. No 
measures could have been more beneficial to the kingdom at large. 
The Jew was the only capitalist in Europe, and heavy as was the 
usury he exacted, his loans gave an impulse to industry such as 
England had never felt before. The century which followed the 
Conquest witnessed an outburst of architectural energy which covered 
the land with castles and cathedrals ; but castle and cathedral alike 
owed their existence to the loans of the Jew. His own example gave 
a new direction to domestic architecture. The buildings which, as at 
Lincoln and S. Edmondsbury, still retain their title of "Jews' Houses," 
were almost the first houses of stone which superseded the mere hovels 
of the English burghers. Nor was the influence of the Jews simply 
industrial. Through their connection with the Jewish schools in Spain 
and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical science. A 
Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford ; Adelard of 
Bath brought back a knowledge of mathematics from Cordova ; Roger 
Bacon himself studied under the English Rabbis. But to the kings 
the Jew was simply an engine of finance. The wealth which his 
industry accumulated was wrung from him whenever the King had 
need, and torture and imprisonment were resorted to if milder entreaties 
failed. It was the wealth of the Jew that filled the royal exchequer 
at the outbreak of war or of revolt. It was in the Hebrew coffers that 
the Norman kings found strength to hold their baronage at bay. 



G 2 



^4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Section VI.— The Englisli Revival, 1071-1127. 

{Authorities. — Orderic and the English chroniclers, as before. Eadmer, a 
monk of Canterbury, in his '*Historia Novorum" and his **Life of Anselm," 
is the chief source of information for the reign of William the Second. William 
of Maimesbuiy and Henry of Huntingdon are both contemporary authorities 
during that of Henry the First : the latter remains a brief but accurate annalist ; 
the former is the leader of a new historic school, who treat English events as 
part of the history of the world, and emulate classic models by a more philo- 
sophical arrangement of their materials. See for them the opening section of 
the next chapter. On the early history of our towns t*he reader may gain some- 
thing from Mr. Thompson's "English Municipal History" (London, 1857) ; 
more from the ** Charter Rolls" (published by the Record Commissioners) ; for 
S. Edmundsbury see ** Chronicle of Jocelyn de Brakelond" (Camden Society). 
The records of the Cistercian Abbeys of Yorkshire in ** Dugdale's Monasticon," 
illustrate the religious revival. Henry's administration is admirably explained 
for the first time by Professor Stubbs (** Documents illustrative," &c.).] 



The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between the 
baronage and the crown began. The wisdom of William^s policy in 
the destruction of the great earldoms which had overshadowed the 
throne, was shown in an attempt at their restoration made by Roger, 
the son of his minister William Fitz-Osbern, and the Breton, Ralf de 
Guader, whom the King had rewarded for his services at Senlac with 
the earldom of Norfolk. The rising was quickly suppressed, Roger 
thrown into prison and Ralf driven over sea ; but the intrigues of 
the baronage soon found another leader in William's half-brother, the 
Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring by arms to the papacy. 
Bishop Odo collected money and men, but the treasure was at once 
seized by the royal officers, and the Bishop arrested in the midst of 
the Court. Even at the King's bidding no officer would venture to 
seize on a prelate of the Church ; it was with his own hands that 
Wilham was forced to effect his arrest. " I arrest not the Bishop, 
but the Earl of Kent," laughed the Conqueror, and Odo remained a 
prisoner till his death. It was in fact this vigorous personahty of 
William which proved the chief safeguard of his throne. " Stark he 
was," says the English chronicler, "to men that withstood him. So 
harsh and cruel was he that none dared resist his will. Earls that 
did aught against his bidding he cast into bonds, bishops he stripped 
of their bishopricks, abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own 
brother ; first he v/as in the land, but the King cast him into bondage. 
If a man would live and hold his lands, need it were that he followed 
the .King's will." But stem as his rule was, it gave peace to the land. 
Even amidst the sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circum- 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



«5 



stances of the Conquest itself, from the erection of castles, or the j 
enclosure of fDrests, or the exactions which built up the great Hoard j 
at Winchester, EngHshmen were unable to forget '^the good peace 
he made in the land, so that a man might fare over his realm with a 
bosom full of gold." Strange touches of a humanity far in advance ; 
of his age contrasted with the general temper of his government, j 
One of the strongest traits in his character was his aversion to I 
shed blood by process of law ; he formally abolished the punish- 
ment of death, and only a single execution stains the annals of his 
reign. An edict yet more honourable to him put an end to the 
slave trade which had till then been carried on at the port of 
Bristol. If he was stark to baron or rebel he was ''mild to them 
that loved God." 

In power as in renown the Conqueror towered high above his pre- 
decessors on the throne. The fear of the Danes, which had so long 
hung like a thunder-cloud over England, passed away before the host 
which William gathered to meet a great armament assembled by 
King Canute. A mutiny dispersed the Danish fleet, and the m.urder 
of its King removed all peril from the North. Scotland, already 
humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by the erection of a 
strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and after penetrating with 
his army to the heart of Wales, the King commenced its systematic 
reduction by settling barons along its frontier with licence to conquer 
the land to their own profit. His closing years were disturbed by a 
rebellion of his son Robert and a quarrel with France ; as he rode 
down the steep street of Mantes, which he had given to the flames, his 
horce stumbled among the embers, and William, flung heavily against 
his saddle, was borne home to Rouen to die. The sound of the 
minster bell woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, 
overlooking the city — it was the hour of prime — and stretching out his 
hands in prayer the Conqueror passed quietly away. With him passed 
the terror which had held the baronage in awe, while the severance 
of his dominions roused their hopes of successful resistance to the 
stern rule beneath which they had bowed. WilKam had bequeathed 
Normandy to his eldest son Robert ; William, his second son, had 
hastened with his father's ring to England, where the influence of 
Lanfranc at once secured him the crown. The baronage seized the 
opportunity to rise in arms under pretext of supporting the claims 
of Robert, v/hose weakness of character gave full scope for the growth 
of feudal independence, and Bishop Odo placed himself at the head 
of the revolt. The new King was thrown almost wholly on the 
loyalty of his English subjects, but their hatred of Norman lawlessness 
rallied them to his standard ; Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, the one 
surviving Bishop of English blood, defeated the insurgents in the 
West, and the King, summoning the freemen of country and town to his 



Sec. VI. 

The 

English 

Revival. 

1071- 

1127. 



Tlie 

Bnglislx 

and their 

Kings. 

1085. 



Death cf 

tlie 

Conqueror* 

10E7. 



/ 



^6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



host under pain of being branded as " nithing " or worthless, advanced 
with a large force against Rochester, where the barons were concen- 
trated. A plague which broke out among the garrison forced them 
to capitulate ; and as the prisoners passed through the royal army, 
cries of " gallows and cord " burst from the English ranks. At 
a later period of his reign a vast conspiracy was organized to place 
Stephen of Albemarle, a distant connection of the royal house, upon 
the throne, but the capture of Robert Mowbray, the Earl of Northum- 
berland, who had placed himself at its head, and the imprisonment 
and exile of his fellow-conspirators, again crushed the hopes of the 
baronage. 

While the spirit of national patriotism rose to life again in this 
struggle of the crown against the baronage, the boldness of a single 
ecclesiastic revived a national opposition to the mere administrative 
despotism which had prevailed since the fatal day of Senlac. If 
William the Red inherited much of his father's energy as well as his 
policy towards the conquered EngHsh, he inherited none of his moral 
grandeur. His profligacy and extravagance soon exhausted the royal 
Hoard, and the death of Lanfranc left him free to fill it at the expense 
of the Church. During the vacancy of a see or abbey its revenues 
went to the royal treasury, and so steadily did William refuse to 
appoint successors to the prelates whom death removed, that at the 
close of his reign one archbishopric, four bishoprics, and eleven abbeys 
were found to be without pastors. The see of Canterbury itself 
remained vacant till a dangerous illness frightened the King into the 
promotion of Anselm, who happened at the time to be in England on 
the business of his house. The Abbot of Bee was dragged to the royal 
couch and the cross forced into his hands, but William had no sooner 
recovered from his sickness than he found himself face to face with 
an opponent whose meek and loving temper rose into firmness and 
grandeur when it fronted the tyranny of the King. The Conquest, as 
we have seen, had robbed the Church of all moral power as the repre- 
sentative of the higher national interests against a brutal despotism 
by placing it in a position of mere dependence on the crown ; and, 
though the struggle between William and the Archbishop turned for 
the most part on points which have no direct bearing on our history, 
the boldness of Anselm's attitude not only broke the tradition of eccle- 
siastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit 
of independence. The real character of the contest appears in the 
Primate's answer, when his remonstrances against the lawless exac- 
tions from the Church were met by a demand for a present on his own 
promotion, and his first offer of five hundred pounds was contemp- 
tuously refused. " Treat me as a free man," Anselm replied, " and I 
devote myself and all that I have to your service, but if you treat me as 
a slave you shall have neither me nor mine„" A burst of the Red King's 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



87 



fury drove the Archbishop from court, and he finally decided to quit the 
country, but his example had not been lost, and the close of William's 
reign found a new spirit of freedom in England with which the greatest 
of the Conqueror's sons was glad to make terms. 

As a soldier the Red King was little inferior to his father. Nor- 
mandy had been sold to him by his brother Robert in exchange for a 
sum which enabled the Duke to march in the first Crusade for the 
delivery of the Holy Land, and a rebellion at Le Mans was subdued 
by the fierce energy with which William flung himself, at the news of 
it, into the first boat he found, and crossed the Channel in face of a 
storm. " Kings never drown," he replied, contemptuously, to the 
remonstrances of his followers. Homage was again wrested from 
Malcolm by a march to the Firth of Forth, and the subse-quent death 
of the King threw Scotland into a disorder which enabled an army 
under Eadgar ^theling to establish Edward, the son of Margaret, as 
an Enghsh feudatory op the throne. In Wales William was less 
triumphant, and the terrible losses inflicted on the heavy Norman 
cavalry in the fastnesses of Snowdon forced him to fall back on the 
slower but wiser policy of the Conqueror. Triumph and defeat alike 
ended in a strange and tragical close ; the Red King was found dead 
by peasants in a glade of the New Forest, with the arrow either of a 
hunter or an assassin in his breast. Robert was still on his return from* 
the Holy Land, where his bravery had redeemed much of his earlier ilL 
fame, and the English crown was at once seized by his younger brother 
Henry, in spite of the opposition of the baronage, who clung to the 
Duke of Normandy and the union of their estates on both sides 
the Channel under a single ruler. Their attitude threw Henry, as it 
had thrown Rufus, on the support of the English, and the two great 
measures which followed his coronation mark the new relation which 
was thus brought about between the people and their King. Henry's 
Charter is important, not merely as the direct precedent for the Great 
Charter ot John, but as the first hmitation which had been imposed 
on the despotism established, by the Conquest. The "evil customs" by 
which the Red King had enslaved and plundered the Church were 
explicitly renounced in it, the unlimited demands made by both the 
Conqueror and his son on the baronage exchanged fqr customary fees, 
while the rights of the people itself, though recognized more vaguely, 
were not forgotten. The barons were held to do justice to their under- 
tenants and to renounce tyrannical exactions from them, the King 
promising to restore order and the " law of Eadward," the old consti- 
tution of the realm, with the changes which his father had introduced. 
His marriage gave a significance to these promises which the meanest 
EngUsh peasant could understand. Edith, or Matilda, was the 
daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and of Margaret, the sister of 
Eadgar iEthehng. She had been brought up in the nunnery of Romsey 



HISTORY OF THE EKGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



I 



by its abbess, her aunt Christina, and the veil which she had taken 
there formed an obstacle to her union with the King, which was only 
removed by the wisdom of Anselm. The Archbishop's recall had been 
one of Henry's first acts after his accession, and Matilda appeared 
before his court to tell her tale in words of passionate earnestness. 
She had been veiled in her childhood, she asserted, only to save her 
from the insults of the rude soldiery who infested the land, had flung 
the veil from her again and again, and had yielded at last to the 
unwomanly taunts, the actual blows of her aunt. "As often as I 
stood in her presence," the girl pleaded passionately to the saintly 
Primate, " I wore the veil, trembling as I wore it with indignation and 
grief. But as soon as I could get out of her sight I used to snatch it 
from my head, fling it on the ground, and trample it under foot. That 
was the way, and none other, in which I was veiled." Anselm at once 
declared her free from conventual bonds, and the shout of the English 
multitude when he set the crown on Matilda's brow drowned the mur- 
mur of Churchman or of baron. The taunts of the Norman nobles, 
who nicknamed the King and his spouse " Farm^er Godric and his 
cummer Godgifu," were lost in the joy of the people at large. For the 
first time since the Conquest, an English sovereign sat on the English 
throne. The blood of Cerdic and Alfred was to blend itself with that 
of Hrolf and the Conqueror. It was impossible that the two peoples 
should henceforth be severed from one another, and their fusion pro- 
ceeded so rapidly that the name of Norman had passed away at the 
accession of Henry the Second, and the descendants of the victors at 
Senlac boasted themselves to be Englishmen. 

We can dimly trace the progress of this blending of the two race<^ 
together in the case of the burgher population in the towns. 

One immediate result of the Conquest had been a great immigration 
ijito England from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the indus- 
trial and trading classes of Normandy followed quick on the conquest 
of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he quartered him- 
self upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his 
English cloister, gathered French artists or French domestics around 
his new castle or his new church. Around the Abbey of Battle, for 
instance, which William had founded on the site of his great victory, 
"Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet the Steward, 
Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor," mixed with the Enghsh 
tenantry. More especially was this the case with the capital. Long 
before the landing of William the Normans had had mercantile 
establishments in London. Their settlement would naturally have 
remained a mere trading colony, but London had no sooner submitted 
to the Conqueror than "many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen 
passed over thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch as 
it was fitter for their trading, and better stored with the merchandise 



II] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



89 



in Which they were wont to traffic." At Norwich and elsewhere the 
French colony isolated itself in a separate French town, side by side 
with the English borough. In London it seems to have taken at once 
the position of a governing class. The name of Gilbert Beket, the 
father of the famous Archbishop, is one of the few that remain to us 
of the Portreeves of London, the predecessors of its Mayors ; he held 
in Stephen's time a large property in houses within the walls, and a 
proof of his civic importance was preserved in the annual visit of each 
newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in the little chapel which 
he had founded in the churchyard of S. PauPs. Yet Gilbert w^as one 
of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the Conqueror ; 
he was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher 
family from Caen. It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, 
partly no doubt to the long internal peace and order secured by the 
Norman rule, that the English towns owed the wealth and importance 
to which they attained during the reign of Henry the First. In the 
silent growth and elevation of the English people the boroughs led 
the way : unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble, they had 
alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The rights of 
self-government, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by 
one's equals, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny by 
the traders and shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet, quaintly named 
streets, in town-mead, and market-place, in the lord's mill beside the 
stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough- 
mote, in the jealousies of craftsmen and guilds, lay the real life of 
Englishmen, the life of their home and trade, their ceaseless, sober 
struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-govern- 
ment. It is difficult to trace the steps by which borough after borough 
won its freedom. The bulk of them were situated in the royal demesne, 
and, like other tenants, their customary rents wxre collected and justice 
administered by a royal officer. Amongst such towns London stood 
chief, and the charter which Henry granted it became the model for 
the rest. The King yielded the citizens the right of justice ; every 
townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town- 
courts or hustings, whose sessions took place every week. They were 
subject only to the old Enghsh trial by oath, and exempt from the 
trial by battle, which the Normans had introduced. Their trade 
was protected from toll or exaction over the length and breadth 
of the land. The ICing however still nominated, in London as else- 
where, the Portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were the citizens 
as yet united together in a commune or corporation ; but an imperfect 
civic organization existed in the " wards " or quarters of the town, each 
governed by its own alderman, and in the ^' guilds " or voluntary asso- 
ciations of merchants' or traders which ensured order and mutual 
protection for their members. Loose, too, as these bonds may seem, 



90 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



S. Ed- 1 
munds* 
bury. 



they were drawn firmly together by the older English traditions of 
freedom which the towns preserved. In London, for instance, the 
burgesses gathered in town-mote when the bell swung out from 
S. PauFs to deliberate freely on their own affair s under the presidency 
of their aldermen. Here, too, they mustered in arms, if danger 
threatened the city, and delivered the city-banner to their captain, the 
Norman baron Fitz- Walter, to lead them against the enemy. Few 
boroughs had as yet attained to power such as this, but charter after 
charter during Henry's reign raised the townsmen of boroughs from 
mere traders, wholly at the mercy of their lord, into customary tenants,, 
who had purchased their freedom by a fixed rent, regulated their own 
trade, and enjoyed exemption from all but their ovrn justice. 

The advance of towns which had grown up not on the royal domain 
but around abbey or castle was slower and more difficult. The story 
of S. Edmundsbury shows how gradual was the transition from pure 
serfage to an imperfect freedom. Much that had been plough-land in 
the time of the Confessor was covered with houses under the Norman 
rule. The building of the great abbey-church drew its craftsmen and 
masons to mingle with the ploughmen and reapers of the Abbot's 
domain. The troubles of the time helped here as elsewhere the 
progress of the town ; serfs, fugitives from justice or their lord, the 
trader, the Jew, naturally sought shelter under the strong hand of 
S. Edmund. But the settlers v/^ere wholly at the Abbot's mercy. Not 
a settler but was bound to pay his pence to the Abbot's treasury, to 
plough a rood of his land, to reap in his harvest-field, to fold his sheep 
in the Abbey folds, to help bring the annual catch of eels from the 
Abbey waters. Within the four crosses that bounded the Abbot's 
domain, land and water were his ; the cattle of the townsmxen paid for 
their pasture on the common ; if the fullers refused the loan of their 
cloth, the cellarer would refuse the use of the stream, and seize their 
looms wherever he found them. No toll might be levied of purchasers 
from the Abbey farms, and customers had to wait before shop and 
stall till the buyers of the Abbot had had the pick of the market. 
There was little chance of redress, for if burghers complained in folk- 
mote, it was before the Abbot's officers that its meeting was held ; if 
they appealed to the alderman, he was the Abbot's nominee, and 
received the horn, the symbol of his office, at the Abbot's hands. 
Like all the gi-eater revolutions of society, the advance from this mere 
serfage was a silent one ; indeed its more galling instances of oppres- 
sion seem to have slipped unconsciously away. Some, like the eel- 
fishing, were commuted for an easy rent ; others, like the slavery of the 
fullers and the toll of flax, simply disappeared. By usage, by omission, 
by downright forgetfulness, here by a little struggle, there by a present 
to a needy abbot, the town won freedom. But progress was not always 
unconscious, and one incident in the history of S. Edmundsbury is 



m 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



91 



i remarkable, not merely as indicating the advance of law, but yet 
.more as marking the part which a new moral sense of man^s right 
s^to equal justice was to play in the general advance of the realm. 
'Rude as the borough was, it had preserved its right of meeting in 
full assembly of the townsmen for government and law. Justice was 
administered in presence of the burgesses, and the accused acquitted 
or condemned by the oath of his neighbours. Without the borough 
bounds, however, the system of the Norman judicature prevailed, and 
the rural tenants who did suit and service at the Cellarer's court were 
subject to the decision of the trial by battle. The execution of a farmer 
named Kebel, who was subject to this feudal jurisdiction, brought the 
two systems into vivid contrast. He seems to have been guiltless of 
the crime laid to his charge, but the duel w€nt against him, and he was 
hung just without the gates. The taunts of the townsmen woke his 
fellow-farmers to a sense of wrong. " Had Kebel been a dweller within 
the borough,'^ said the burgesses, " he would have got his acquittal from 
the oaths of his neighbours, as our liberty is ; " and even the monks 
were moved to a decision that their tenants should enjoy equal liberty 
and justice with the townsmen. The franchise of the town was ex- 
tended to the rural possessions of the Abbey without it, the farmers 
" came to the toll-house, were written in the alderman's roll, and paid 
the town-penny.'' 

The moral revolution which events like this indicate was backed by 
a religious revival which forms a marked feature in the reign of Henry 
the First. Pious, learned, and energetic as the bishops of William's 
appointment had been, they were not Englishmen. Till Beket's time 
no Englishmen occupied the throne of Canterbury; till Jocelyn, in 
the reign of John, no Englishmen occupied the see of Wells. In 
language, in manner, in sympathy, the higher clergy were thus com- 
pletely severed from the lower priesthood and the people, and the whole 
influence of the Church, constitutional as well as religious, was for the 
moment paralysed. Lanfranc indeed exercised a great personal in- 
fluence over William, but Anselm stood alone against Rufus, and no 
voice of ecclesiastical freedom broke the simoniac silence of the 
reign of Henry the First. But at the close of the latter reign and 
throughout that of Stephen, the people, left thus without shepherds, 
was stirred by the first of those great religious movements which 
England was to experience afterwards in the preaching of the Friars, 
the Lollardism of Wyclif, the Reformation, the Puritan enthusiasm, 
and the mission work of the Wesleys. Everyv/here in town and 
country men banded themselves together for prayer, hermits flocked 
to the woods, noble and churl welcomed the austere Cistercians, a 
reformed outshoot of the Benedictine order, as they spread over 
the moors and forests of the North. A n^w spirit of devotion 
woke the slumber of the religious houses, and penetrated alike 



92 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

The 

English 

Revival. 

1071- 

1127. 



A 



Henry's 
A^dminis- 
tration. 



to the home of the noble Walter d'Espec at Rievaulx, or of the 
trader Gilbert Beket in Cheapside. London took its full share m 
the great revival, '^he city was proud of its religion, its thirteen 
conventual and more than a hundred parochial churches. The 
new impulse changed, in fact, its very aspect. In the midst of the 
city Bishop Richard busied himself with the vast cathedral which 
Bishop Maurice had begun ; barges came up the river with stone 
from Caen for the great arches that moved the popular wonder, while 
street and lane were being levelled to make space for the famous 
Churchyard of S. PauPs. Rahere, the King's minstrel, raised the 
priory of S. Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built S. Giles's at 
Cripplegate. The old English Cnihtena-gild surrendered their soke 
of Aldgate as a site for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale 
of this house paints admirably the temper of the citizens at this time. 
Its founder. Prior Norman, had built church and cloister and bought 
books and vestments in so liberal a fashion that at last no money 
remained to buy bread. The canons were at their last gasp when many 
of the city folk, looking into the refectory as they paced round the 
cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the tables laid but not a 
single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set-out," cried the citizens, "but 
where is the bread to come from 1 " The women present vowed to 
bring a loaf every Sunday, and there was soon bread enough and to 
spare for the priory and its guests. We see the strength of the new move- 
ment in the new class of ecclesiastics that it forces on the stage ; men 
like Anselm or John of Salisbury, or the two great prelates who followed 
one another after Henry's death in the see of Canterbury, Theobald 
and Thomas derived whatever might they possessed from sheer holiness 
of life or unselfishness of aim. The revival left its stamp on the fabric 
of the constitution itself : the paralysis of the Church ceased as the new 
impulse bound the prelacy and people together, and its action, when 
at the end of Henry's reign it started into a power strong enough to 
save England from anarchy, has been felt in our history ever since. 

From this revival of English feeling Henry himself stood jealously 
aloof; but the enthusiasm which his marriage had excited enabled 
him to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffection of his nobles. 
Robert landed like his father at Pevensey, to find himself face to face 
witli an English army which Anselm's summons had gathered round 
the King ; and his retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the rebel 
barons. Robert of Belesme, the son of Roger of Montgomery, was 
now their chief; but 6o,ooo English footmen followed the King 
through the rough passes which led to Shrewsbury, and an early 
surrender alone saved Robert's life. Master of his own realm and en- 
riched by the confiscated lands of the revolted baronage, Henry crossed 
into Normandy, where the misgovernment of Robert had alienated 
the clergy and trades, and where the outrages of the Norman nobles 



IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



93 



forced the more peaceful classes to call the King to their aid. On the 
licld of Tenchebray his forces met those of the Duke, and a decisive 
English victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hastings. The 
conquered duchy became an appanage of the English crown, and 
Henry's energies v/ere frittered away through a quarter of a century in 
crushing its revolts, the hostility of the French, and the efforts of his 
nephew, William, the son of Robert, to regain the crown which his 
father had lost at Tenchebray. In England, however, all was peace. 
The vigorous administration of Henry the First completed in fullest 
detail the system of government which the Conqueror had sketched. 
The vast estates which had fallen to the crown through forfeiture and 
revolt were granted out to new men dependent on royal favour ; while 
the towns were raised into a counterbalancing force to the feudahsm of 
the country by the grant of charters and the foundation of trade-guilds. 
K new organization of justice and finance bound the kingdom together 
under the royal administration. The Clerks of the Royal Chapel were 
fonned into a body of secretaries or royal ministers, whose head bore 
the title of Chancellor. Above them stood the Justiciar, or Lieutenant- 
General of the kingdom, who in the frequent absence of the King acted 
as Regent of the realm, and whose staff, selected from the barons con- 
nected with the royal household, were formed into a Supreme Court of 
Appeal. The King's Court, as this was called, permanently represented 
the whole court of royal vassals, which had hitherto been summoned 
thrice in the year. As the royal council, it revised and registered 
laws, and its " counsel and consent," though merely formal, presei*ved 
the principle of the older popular legislation. As a court of justice it 
formed the highest court of appeal : it could call up any suit from a 
lower tribunal on the application of a suitor, while the union of several 
sheriffdoms under one of its members connected it closely with the 
local courts. As a financial body, its chief work lay in the assessment 
and collection of the revenue. In this capacity it took the name of the 
Court of Exchequer, from the chequered table, much like a chess- 
board, at which it sat, and on which accounts were rendered. In their 
tinancial capacity its justices became "barons of the Exchequer." Twice 
every year the sheriff of each county appeared before these barons and 
rendered the sum of the fixed rent from royal domains, the Danegeld 
or tax, the fines of the local courts, the feudal aids from the baronial 
estates, which formed the chief part of the royal revenue. Local 
disputes respecting these payments or the assessment of the town-rent 
were settled by a detachment of barons from the court who made the 
circuit of the shires, and whose fiscal visitations led to the judicial 
visitations, the "judges' circuits," w^hicli still form so marked a feature 
in our legal system. 

From this work of internal reform Henry's attention was called sud- 
denly by one terrible loss to the question of the succession to the 



94 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLiSR PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



throne. His son William '^ the i^theling/^ as the English fondly styled 
the child of their own Matilda, had with a crowd of nobles accom- 
panied the King on his return from Normandy ; but the White Ship 
in which he had embarked lingered behind the rest of the royal fleet, 
while the young nobles, excited with wine, hung over the ship's side 
and chased away with taunts the priest who came to give the customary 
benediction. At last the guards of the King's treasure pressed the 
vessel's departure, and, driven by the arms of fifty rowers, it swept 
swiftly out to sea. All at once the ship's side struck on a rock at 
the mouth of the harbour, and in an instant it sank beneath the 
waves. One terrible ciy, ringing through the stillness of the night, was 
heard by the royal fleet, but it was not till the morning that the fatal 
news reached the King. He fell unconscious to the ground, and rose 
never to smile again. Henry had no other son, and the whole circle of 
his foreign foes closed round him the more fiercely that the son of 
Robert was now his natural heir. The King hated William, while he 
loved Maud, the daughter who still remained to him, who had been 
married to the Emperor Henry the Fifth, and whose husband's death 
now restored her to her father. He recognized her as his heir, though the 
succession of a woman seemed strange to the feudal baronage ; nobles 
and priests were forced to swear allegiance to her as their future mis- 
tress, and Henry affianced her to the son of the one foe he really 
feared, the Count of Anjou. 



Section VII.— England and Anjou, 870-1154. 

^^Authorities. — The chief documents for Angevin history have been collected 
in the '^ Chroniques d' Anjou," published by the Historical Society of France 
(Paris, 1856). The best known of these is the "Gesta Comitum," a com- 
pilation of the twelfth century (given also by D'Achery, " Spicilegium," 4to. 
vol. X. p. 534)) 1^ which the eariier romantic traditions are simply dressed up 
into historical shape by copious quotations from the French historians. Save 
for the reigns of Geoffry Martel, and Fulc of Jerusalem, it is nearly valueless. 
The short autobiography of Fulc Rechin is the most authentic memorial of the 
earlier Angevin history ; and much can be gleaned from the verbose life of 
Geoffry the Handsome by John of Marmoutiers. For England, Orderic and 
the Chronicle die out in the midst of Stephen's reign ; here, too, end William 
of Malmesbury, Huntingdon, the **Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail 
by one of Stephen's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers, who are most valuable 
for its opening (published by Mr. Raine for the Surtees Society). The blank 
in our historical literature extends over the first years of Henry the Second. 
The lives and letters of Beket have been industriously collected — in a disorderly 
way — and published by Dr. Giles.] 



To understand the history of England under its Angevin rulers, we W\ 
must first know something of the Angevins themselves. The character ■ 
and the policy of Henry the Second and his sons were as much a 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



95 



heritage of their race as the broad lands of Anjou. The fortunes of 
England were being slowly wrought out in every incident of the 
history of the Counts, as the descendants of a Breton woodman became 
masters not of Anjou only, but of Touraine, Maine, and Poitou, of 
Gascony and Auvergne, of Acquitaine and Normandy, and sovereigns 
at last of the great realm which Normandy had won. The legend of 
the father of their races carries us back to the times of our own 
Alfred, when the Danes were ravaging along Loire as they ravaged 
along Thames. In the heart of the Breton border, in the debateable 
land between France and Brittany, dwelt Tortulf the Forester, half- 
brigand, half-hunter as the gloomy days went, living in free outlaw- 
fashion in the woods about Rennes. Tortulf had learned in his rough 
forest school " how to strike the foe, to sleep on the bare ground, to 
bear hunger and toil, summer's heat and winter^s frost, how to fear 
nothing save ill-fame." Following King Charles the Bald in his 
struggle with the Danes, the woodman won broad lands along Loire, 
and his son Ingelger, who had swept the Northmen from Touraine and 
the land to the west, which they had burnt and wasted into a vast 
sohtude, became the first Count of Anjou. The second, Fulc the Red, 
attached himself to the Dukes of France, who were now drawing 
nearer to the throne, and received from them in guerdon the western 
portion of Anjou which lay across the Mayenne. The story of his 
son is a stor}^ of peace, breaking like a quiet idyll the war-storms of 
his house. Alone of his race Fulc the Good waged no wars : his 
delight was to sit in the choir of Tours and to be called " Canon." 
One Martinmas eve Fulc was singing there in clerkly guise, when the 
King, Lewis d'Outremer, entered the church. '^ He sings like a 
priest," laughed the King, as his nobles pointed mockingly to the 
figure of the Count-Canon ; but^Fulc was ready with his reply. " Know, 
my lord," wrote the Count of Anjou, "that a King unlearned is a 
crowned ass." Fulc was in fact no priest, but a busy ruler, governing, 
enforcing peace, and carrying justice to every corner of the wasted 
land. To him alone of his race men gave the title of " the Good." 

Hampered by revolt, himself in character little more than a bold, 
dashing soldier, Fulc's son, Geoffry Grey-gown, sank almost into a 
v^assal of his powerful neighbours, the Counts of Blois and Champagne. 
The vassalage was roughly shaken off by his successor. Fulc Nerra, 
Fulc the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we 
can trace that marked type of character which their house was to pre- 
serve with a fatal constancy through two hundred years. He was 
without natural affection. In his youth he burnt a wife at the stake, 
and legend told how he led her to her doom decked out in his gayest 
attire. In his old age he waged his bitterest war against his son, and 
exacted from him when vanquished a humiliation which men reserved 
for the deadliest of their foes. " You are conquered, you are con- 



Sec. VI j. 
England 

AND 

Anjou. 
870- 
1154.. 



96 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



quered ! " shouted the old man in fierce exultation, as Geoffry, bridled 
and saddled like a beast of burden, crawled for pardon to his father's 
feet. In Fulc first appeared the low type of superstition which 
startled even superstitious ages in the early Plantagenets, a super- 
stition based simply on terror and stript of all poetry or belief. 
Robber as he was of Church lands, and contemptuous of ecclesiastical 
censures, the fear of the end of the world drove Fulc to the Holy 
Sepulchre. Barefoot and with the strokes of the scourge falling heavily 
on his shoulders, the Count had himself dragged by a halter through 
the streets of Jerusalem, and courted the doom of martyrdom by his 
wild outcries of penitence. He rewarded the fidelity of Herbert of Le 
Mans, whose aid saved him from utter ruin, by entrapping him into 
captivity and robbing him of his lands. He secured the terrified friend- 
ship of the French king by despatching twelve assassins to cut down 
before his eyes the minister who had troubled it. Familiar as the age 
was with treason and rapine and blood, it recoiled from the cool 
cynicism of his crimes, and believed the wrath of Heaven to have been 
revealed against the union of the worst forms of evil in Fulc the Black. 
But neither the wrath of Heaven nor the curses of men broke with a 
single mishap the fifty years of his success. 

At his accession Anjou was the least important of the greater pro- 
vinces of France. At his death it stood, if not in extent, at least in 
real power, first among them all. Cool-headed, clear-sighted, quick 
to resolve, quicker to strike, Fulc's career was one long series of 
victories over all his rivals. He was a consummate general, and he 
had the gift of personal bravery, which was denied to some of his 
greatest descendants. There was a moment in the first of his battles 
when the day seemed lost for Anjou ; a feigned retreat of the Bretons 
had drawn the Anjevin horsemen into a line of hidden pitfalls, and 
the Count himself was flung heavily to the ground. Dragged from the 
medley of men and horses, he swept down almost singly on the foe 
" as a storm-wind " (so rang the pasan of the Angevins) " sweeps down 
on the thick corn-rows," and the field was won. To these qualities of 
the warrior he added a power of political organization, a capacity for 
far-reaching combinations, a faculty of statesmanship, which became 
the heritage of the Angevins, and lifted them as high above the intel- 
lectual level of the rulers of their time as their shameless wickedness 
degraded them below the level of man. His overthrow of Brittany on the 
field of Conquereux v/as followed by the gradual absorption of Southern 
Touraine, while his restless activity covered the land with castles and 
abbeys. The very spirit of the Black Count seems still to frown from 
the dark tower of Duretal on the sunny valley of the Loir. His great 
victory at Pontlevoi crushed the rival house of Blois; the seizure of 
Saumur completed his conquests in the south, while Northern Touraine 
was won bit by bit till only Tours resisted the Angevin. The 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



97 



treacherous seizure of its Count, Herbert Wake-^dog, left Maine at his 
mercy ere the old man bequeathed his unfinished work to his son. As 
a warrior GeotfryM artel was hardly inferior to his father. A decisive 
overthrow wrested Tours from the Count of Blois ; a second left Poitou 
at his mercy ; and the seizure of Le Mans brought him to the Norman 
border. Here^ as we have seen, his advance was checked by the 
genius of William the Conqueror, and with his death the greatness of 
Anjou seemed for the time to have come to an end. 

Stripped of Maine by the Normans, and weakened by internal dis- 
sensions, the weak and profligate administration of Fulc Rechin left 
Anjou powerless against its rivals along the Seine. It woke to fresh 
energy with the accession of his son, Fulc of Jerusalem. Now urging 
the turbulent Norman noblesse to revolt against the justice of their King, 
now supporting the Clito in his struggle against his uncle, offering 
himself throughout as the one support of France, hemmed in as it was 
on all sides by the forces of Normandy and its alHes the Counts of 
Blois and Champagne, Fulc was the one enemy whom Henry the 
First really fenred. It was to disarm his restless hostility that the 
King yielded to his son, Geoffrythe Handsome, the hand of his daugh- 
ter Matilda. No marriage could have been more unpopular, and the 
secrecy with which it was effected was held by the barons as freeing 
them from the oath which they had sworn ; for no baron could give a 
husband to his daughter, if he was without sons, save by his lord's 
consent, and by a strained analogy the barons contended that their own 
assent was necessary for the marriage of Maud. A more pressing 
danger lay in the greed of her husband Geoffry, who from his habit 
of wearing the common broom of Anjou (the planta genista) in his 
helmet had acquired, in addition to his surname of " the Handsome," 
the more famous title of " Plantagenet." His claims ended at last in 
intrigues with the Norman nobles, and Henry hurried to the border 
to meet an expected invasion, but the plot broke down at his presence, 
the Angevins withdrew, and the old man withdrew to the forest of 
Lyons to die. 

" God give him," wrote the Archbishop of Rouen from Henry's death- 
bed, " the peace he loved." With him indeed closed the long peace of 
the Norman rule. An outburst of anarchy followed on the news of his 
departure, and in the midst of the turmoil Earl Stephen, his nephew, 
appeared at the gates of London. Stephen was the son of the Con- 
queror's daughter, Adela, who had married a Count of Blois ; he had been 
brought up at the English court, and his claim as nearest male heir, save 
his brother, of the Conqueror's blood (for his cousin, the son of Robert, 
had fallen in Flanders) was supported by his personal popularity. Mere 
swordsman as he was, his good-humour, his generosity, his very prodi- 
gality made him a favourite with all. No noble, however, had as yet 
ventured to join him, nor had any town opened its gates when London 



98 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



Sec. vii. poured out to meet him with uproarious welcome. Neither baron nor 
prelate were present to constitute a National Council, but the great 
city did not hesitate to take their place. The voice of her citizens had 
long been accepted as representative of the popular assent in the elec 
tion of a king ; but it marks the progress of English independence 
under Henry that London now claimed of itself the right of election. 
Undismayed by the absence of the hereditary counsellors of the crown, 
its " aldermen and wise folk gathered together the folk-mote, and 
these providing at their own will for the good of the realm, unanimously 
resolved to choose a king." The solemn deliberation ended in the 
choice of Stephen : the citizens swore to defend the King with money 
and blood, Stephen swore to apply his whole strength to the pacifi- 
cation and good government of the realm. 

If London was true to her oath, Stephen was false to his. The twenty 
years of his reign are years of a misrule and disorder unknown in 
our history. Stephen had been acknowledged even by the partisans of 
Matilda, but his weakness and prodigality soon gave room to feudal 
revolt. Released from the stern hand of Henry, the barons fortified 
their castles, and their example was necessarily followed, in self-defence, 
by the great prelates and nobles who had acted as ministers to the late 
King. Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, was at the head of this party, and 
Stephen, suddenly quitting his inaction, seized him at Oxford and flung 
him into prison till he had consented to surrender his fortresses. The 
Kings violence, while it cost him the support of the clergy, opened the 
way for Matilda's landing in England ; and the country was soon divided 
between the adherents of the two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, 
London and the East Stephen. A defeat at Lincoln left the latter a 
captive in the hands of his enemies ; Matilda entered London, and was 
received throughout the land as its " Lady," but the di'sdain with which 
she repulsed the claim of the city to the enjoyment of its older privi- 
leges roused its burghers to arms. Flying to Oxford, she was be-, 
sieged there by Stephen, who had obtained his release ; but she es-! 
caped in white robes by a postern, and crossing the river unobserved on 
the ice, made her way to Abingdon, to return some years after to Nor- 
mand)^ The war had, in fact, became a mere chaos of pillage andt 
bloodshed. The outrages of the feudal baronage showed from whatm 
horrors the Norman rule had so long saved England. No more ghastly " 
picture of a nation's misery has ever been painted than that which 
closes the English Chronicle, whose last accents falter out amidst 
the horrors of the time. "They hanged up men by their feet and 
smoked them with foul smoke. Some were hanged up by their thumbs, 
others by the head, and burning things were hung on to their feet. 
They put knotted strings about their head and writhed them till they 
went into the brain. They put men into prisons where adders and 
snakes and toads were crawling, and so they tormented them. Some 



\ 



II.J 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



99 



they put into a chest short and narrow and not deep, and that had 
sharp stones within, and forced men therein so that they broke all their 
limbs. In many of the castles were hateful and grim things called 
rachenteges, which two or three men had enough to do to carr>'. It 
was thus made : it was fastened to a beam, and had a sharp iron to go 
about a man's neck and throat, so that he might noways sit, or lie, or ' 
sleep, but he bore all the iron. Many thousands they afflicted with 
hunger." One gleam of national glory broke the darkness of the time. 
King David of Scotland stood first among the partisans of his kins- 
woman Matilda, and on the accession of Stephen his army crossed 
the border to enforce her claim. The pillage and cruelties of the wild 
tribes of Galloway and the Highlands roused the spirit of the North: 
baron and freeman gathered at York round Archbishop Thurstan, and 
marched to the field of Northallerton to await the foe. The sacred 
banners of S. Cuthbert of Durham, S. Peter of York, S. John of 
Beverley, and S. Wilfred of Ripon hung from a pole fixed in a four- 
wheeled car which stood in the centre of the host. " I who wear no 
armour," shouted the chief of the Galwegians, " Vv^ill go as far this day 
as any one with breastplate of mail; " his men charged with wild 
shouts of "Albin^ Albin," and were followed by the Norman knighthood 
of the Lowlands. The rout, however, was complete ; the fierce hordes 
dashed in vain against the close English ranks around the standard, 
and the whole army fled in confusion to Carlisle. 

England was rescued from this Ghaos of misrule by the efforts of | 
the Church. In the early part of Stephen's reign his brother Henry, the | 
Bishop of Winchester, acting as Papal Legate for the realm, had striven ! 
to supply the absence of any royal or national authority by convening j 
synods of bishops, and by asserting the moral right of the Church to 
declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne. The compact between 
king and people had become a part of constitutional law in the 
Charter of Henry, but its legitimate consequence in the responsibility 
of the crown for the execution of the compact was first drawn out 
by these ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions of 
Stephen and Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward and 
Richard, and the solemn act by which the succession was changed 
in the case of James, Extravagant and unauthorized as their ex- 
pression of it may appear, they did express the right of a nation to 
good government. Henry of Winchester, however, "half monk, half 
soldier," as he was called, possessed too little religious influence to 
wield a really spiritual power ; it was only at the close of Stephen's 
reign that the nation really found a moral leader in Theobald, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury. "To the Church," Thomas justly said 
afterwards, with the proud consciousness of having been Theobald's 
right hand, " Henry owed his crown and England her deliver- 
ance." Thomas was the son of Gilbert Beket, the Portreeve of ^ 

H 2 



Battle cftJu' 

Standani. 

1137- 



iCX> 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



London, the site of whose house is still marked by the Mercers' chapel 
in Cheapside ; his mother Rohese was the type of the devout woman 
of her day, and weighed her boy each year on his birthday against 
money, clothes, and provisions which she gave to the poor. Thomas 
grew up amidst the Norman barons and clerks who frequented his 
father's house with a genial freedom of character tempered by the 
Norman refinement ; he passed from the school of Merton to the 
University of Paris, and returned to fling himself into the life of the 
young nobles of the time. Tall, handsome, bright-eyed, ready of wit 
and speech, his firmness of temper showed itself in his very sports ; 
to rescue his hawk which had fallen into the water he once plunged 
into a millrace, and was all but crushed by the wheel. The loss of his 
father's wealth drove him to the court of Archbishop Theobald, and 
he soon became the Primate's confidant in his plans for the rescue of 
England. Henry, the son of Matilda and Geoffry, had now by the^ 
death of his father become master of Normandy and Anjou,. while by I 
his marriage with its duchess, Eleanor of Poitou, he had added " ' 
Acquitane to his dominions. Thomas, as Theobald's agent, invited 
Henry to appear in England, and on the Duke's landing the Arch- 
bishop interposed between the rival claimants to the crown. The 
Treaty of Wallingford abolished the evils of the long anarchy ; the 
castles were to be razed, the crown lands resumed, the foreign mer- 
cenaries banished from the country. Stephen was recognized as King, 
and in turn acknowledged Henry as his heir. But a year had hardly 
passed when Stephen's death gave his rival the crown. 



Section VIII.— Henry tlie Second, 1154-1189. 

[Authorities. — Up to the death of Archbishop Thomas we have only the letters 
of Beket himself, Foliot, and John of Salisbury, collected by Dr. Giles ; but this 
dearth is followed by a vast outburst of historical industry. From 1169 till 
1 192 our primary authority is the Chronicle known as that of Benedict of Peter- 
borough, admirably edited by Professor Stubbs, who has shown the probability 
of its authorship being really due to the royal treasurer. Bishop Richard Fitz- 
Neal. It is continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden. Both are works of the 
highest value, and have been edited for the Rolls series by Professor Stubbs, 
whose prefaces have thrown a new light on the constitutional history of Henry's 
reign. The history by William of Newborough (which ends in 1 198) is a 
work of the classical school, like William of Malmesbury, but distinguished 
by its fairness and good sense. The chronicles of Ralf Niger, with the ad^ 
ditions of Ralf of Coggeshall, that of Gervase of Canterbury, the Life of S. 
Hugh cf Lincoln (edited by Mr. Dimock), the voluminous works of Giraldus 
Cambrensis, now editing by Professor Brewer and Mr. Dimock, may be selected 
as especially useful aniidst the vast mass of materials for Henry's reign. I 
have given some account of these in the opening of the next chapter. Lord 
Lyttelton's "Life of Henry the Second" is a full and sober account of the 
time ; Canon Robertson's Biography of Jacket is accurate, but hostile in tone. 



111.] 



ENGLAND UND2LR FOREIGN KINGS, 



In his ** Documents" Professor Stubbs has printed the various ** Assizes," and 
the Dialogus de Scaccario, which explains the financial administration of the 
Curia Regis.] 

Young as he was, Henry mounted the throne with a resolute purpose 
of government which his reign carried steadily out. His practical, 
serviceable frame suited the hardest worker of his time. There was 
something in his build and look, in the square stout frame, the fiery 
face, the close-cropped hair, the prominent eyes, the bull neck, the 
coarse strong hands, the bowed legs, that marked out the keen, 
stirring, coarse-fibred man of business. " He never sits down,'' said 
one who observed him closely ; " he is always on his legs from morning 
till night." Orderly in business, careless in appearance, sparing in 
diet, never resting or giving his servants rest, chatty, inquisitive, en- 
dowed with a singular charm of address and strength of memory, 
obstinate in love or hatred, a fair scholar, a great hunter, his general 
air that of a rough, passionate, busy man, Henry's personal character 
told directly on the character of his reign. His accession marks the 
period of amalgamation, when neighbourhood and traffic and inter- 
marriage drew Englishmen and Normans so rapidly into a single 
people, that the two races soon cease to be distinguishable from one 
another. A national feeling was thus springing up, before which the 
barriers of the older feudalism were to be swept away. Henry had 
even less reverence for the feudal past than the men of his day ; he 
was, indeed, utterly without the imagination and reverence which 
enable men to sympathise with any past at all. He had a practical 
man's impatience of the obstacles thrown in the way of his reforms by 
the older constitution of the realm, nor could he understand other men's 
reluctance to purchase undoubted improvements by the sacrifice of 
customs and traditions of bygone days. Without any theoretical hos- 
tility to the co-ordinate powers of the state, it seemed to him a perfectly 
reasonable and natural course to trample either baronage or Church 
under foot to gain his end of good government. He saw clearly, that 
the remedy for such anarchy as England had endured under Stephen 
lay in the establishment of a kingly government unembarrassed by 
any privileges of order or class, administered by royal servants, and 
in whose public administration the nobles acted simply as delegates 
of the sovereign. His work was to lie in the organization of judicial 
and administrative forms which realized this idea, but of the great 
currents of thought and feeling which were tending in the same 
du'ection he knew nothing. What he did for the great moral and 
social revolution of his time was simply to let it alone. Religion grew 
more and more identified with patriotism under the eyes of a King 
v/ho whispered, and scribbled, and looked at picture-books during 
mass, who never confessed, and cursed God in wild frenzies of blas- 



Sec. viil 

Henry the 
Second. 
115-4- 
1139. 



ro2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAf*. 



pliemy. Great peoples formed themselves on both sides of the sea 
round a sovereign who bent the whole force of his min^ to hold to- 
gether an Empire which the growth of nationality must inevitably 
destroy. There is throughout a tragic grandeur in the irony of 
Henr/s position, that of a Sforza of the fifteenth century set in the 
midst of the twelfth, building up by patience and polrcy and craft 
a composite dominion, alien to the deepest sympathies of his age, and 
swept away in the end by popular forces to whose existence his very 
cleverness and activity blinded him. But indirectly, and uncon- 
sciously, his policy did more than that of all his predecessors to pre • 
pare England for the unity-^ and freedom which the fall of his house 
was to reveal. 

He had been placed on the throne, as we have seen, by the Church. 
His first work was to repair the evils which England had endured till 
his accession by the restoration of the system of Henry the First ; and 
it was with tLe aid and counsel of Theobald that the foreign marauders 
were driven from the realm, the castles demolished in spite of the 
opposition of the baronage, the King's Court and Exchequer restored. 
Age and infirmity however warned the Primate to retire from the post 
of minister, and his power fell into the younger and more vigorous hands 
of Thomas Beket, who had long acted as his confidential adviser. 
Thomas, who now became Chancellor, won the personal favour of the 
King. The two young men had, in Theobald's words, " but one heart 
and mind;" Henry jested in the Chancelloi-'s hall, or tore his cloak 
from his shoulders in rough horse-play as they rode through the streets. 
He loaded his favourite with riches and honours, but there is no' 
ground for thinking that Thomas in any degree influenced his system 
of rule. Henry's policy seems, for good or evil, to have been through- 
out his own. As yet, his designs appeared to aim chiefly at power 
across the Channel, where he was already master of a third of our 
present France. He had inherited Anjou and Touraine from his 
father, Maine and Normandy from his mother, and the seven provinces 
of the South, Poitou, Saintonge, Auvergne, Perigord, the Limousin, 
the Angoumois, and Guienne, as the dowry of his wife. The actual 
dominions of Lewis the Seventh were far smaller than his own, and 
the tact of Beket had bound the French king to Henry's interests by 
securing for Henry's son the hand of Marguerite, the daughter of 
Lewis, and in default of sons the heiress of his realm. But even 
Lewis was roused to resistance when Henry prepared to enforce by 
arms his claims on Toulouse ; he threw himself into the town, and 
Henry, in spite of his Chancellor's remonstrances, at once withdrew. 
Thomas had fought bravely throughout the campaign, at the head of the 
700 knights who formed his household, but the King had other work for 
him than war. On Theobald's death he at once forced on the monks 
of Canterbury, and on Thomas himself, his election as Archbishop. 



li 



n.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



His purpose in this appointment was soon revealed. Henry at once 
proposed to the bishops that a clerk, convicted of a crime, should be 
deprived of his orders, and handed over to the King's tribunals. The 
local courts of the feudal baronage had been roughly shorn of their 
power by the judicial reforms of Henry the First, and the Church 
courts, as the Conqueror had created them, with their exclusive right of 
justice over the whole body of educated men throughout the realm, 
formed the one great exception to the system which was concen- 
trating all jurisdiction in the hands of the King. The bishops yielded, 
but opposition came from the very prelate whom Henry had created to 
enforce his will. From the moment of his appointment Thomas had 
flung himself with the whole energy of his nature into the part he had 
to play. At the first intimation of Henry's purpose he had pointed 
with a laugh to his gay attire — " You are choosing a fine dress to 
figure at the head of your Canterbury monks ;" but once monk and 
primate, he passed with a fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism. 
Even as minister he had opposed the King's designs, and foretold their 
future opposition : " You will soon hate me as much as you love me 
now," he said, ^' for you assume an authority in the affairs of the 
Church to which I shall never assent." A prudent man might have 
doubted the wisdom of destroying the only shelter which protected 
piety or learning against a despot like the Red King, and in the mind 
of Thomas the ecclesiastical immunities were parts of the sacred heri- 
tage of the Church. He stood without support ; the Pope advised 
concession, the bishops forsook him, and Thomas bent at last to agree 
to the Constitutions, or Concordat between Church and State, which 
Henry presented to the Council of Clarendon. Many of its clauses 
were simply a re-enactment of the system established by the Con- 
queror. The election of bishop or abbot was to take place before royal 
officers, in the King's chapel, and with the King's assent. The prelate 
elect was bound to do homage to the King for his lands before conse- 
cration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the King, subject to 
all feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in the King's court. 
No bishop might leave the realm without the royal pennission. No 
tenant in chief or royal servant should be excomimunicated, or their 
land placed under interdict, but by the King's assent. But the legisla- 
tion respecting ecclesiastical jurisdiction was wholly new. The King's 
<:ourt was to decide whether a suit between clerk and layman, whose 
nature was disputed, belonged to the Church courts or the King's. A 
royal officer was to be present in all ecclesiastical proceedings, in order 
to confine the Bishop's court within its own due limits, and a clerk once 
convicted there passed at once under the civil jurisdiction. An appeal 
v%^as left from the Archbishop's court to the King's court for defect of 
justice. The privilege of sanctuary in churches or churchyards was 
repealed, so far as property and not persons was conc-erned. No serf's 



I04 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



son could be admitted to orders without his lord's permission. After a 
passionate refusal the Primate at last set his seal to the Constitutions, but 
his assent was soon retracted, and the King's savage resentment threw 
the whole moral advantage of the position into the Archbishop's hands. 
'Vexatious charges were brought against him ; in the Council of North- 
ampton his life was said to be in danger, and all urged him to submit. 
But in the presence of danger the courage of the man rose to its full 
height ; grasping his archiepiscopal cross he entered the royal court, 
forbade the nobles to condemn him, and appealed to the Papal See. 
Shouts of " Traitor! traitor ! " followed him as he retired. The Primate 
turned fiercely at the word : " Were I a knight," he retorted, " my 
sword should answer that foul taunt." At nightfall he fled in disguise, 
and reached France through Flanders. For six years the contest 
raged bitterly ; at Rome, at Paris the agents of the two powers in- 
trigued against each other. Henry stooped to acts of the meanest perse- 
cution in driving the Primate's kinsmen from England, and in confis- 
cating the lands of their order till the monks of Pontigny should refuse 
Thomas a home ; while Beket himself exhausted the patience of his 
friends by his violence and excommunications, as well as by the 
stubbornness with which he clung to the offensive clause "Saving 
the honour of my order," the addition of which would have practi- 
cally neutralized the King's reforms. The Pope counselled mild- 
ness, L'^wis himself for a time withdrew his support, his own clerks 
gave way at last. " Come up," said one of them bitterly when his horse 
stumbled on the road, " saving the honour of the Church and my order." 
But neither warning nor desertion moved the resolution of the Primate. 
Henry, in dread of Papal excommunication, resolved at last on the 
coronation of his son^ in defiance of the privileges of Canterbury, by 
the Archbishop of York ; but the Pope's hands were now freed by his 
successes in Italy, and the threat of his interposition forced the 
King to a show of submission. The Archbishop was allowed to 
return after a reconciliation with the King at Fretheval, and the Ken- 
tishmen flocked around him with uproarious welcome as he entered 
Canterbury. " This is England," said his clerks, as they saw the 
white headlands of the coast. " You will wish yourself elsewhere be- 
fore fifty days are gone," said Thomas, sadly, and his foreboding showed 
his appreciation of Henry's character. He was now in the royal 
power, and orders had already been issued by the younger Henry for 
his arrest, when four knights from the King's court, spurred to out- 
rage by a passionate outburst of their master's wrath, crossed the sea 
and forced their way into the Archbishop's palace. After a stormy parley 
v/ith him in his chamber they withdrew to arm, and Thomas was hurried 
by his clerks into the cathedral. As he reached the steps leading from 
the transept to the choir his pursuers burst in shouting from the 
cloisters. " Where," cried Reginald Fitzurse in the dusk of the dimly 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



lighted minster, " where is the traitor, Thomas Beket ?" The Primate 
turned resolutely back : " Here am I, no traitor, but a priest of God," 
he repHed, and again descending the steps he placed himself with his 
back against a pillar and fronted his foes. All the bravery, the violence 
of his old knightly life seemed to revive in Thomas as he tossed back the 
threats and demands of his assailants. " You are our prisoner," shouted 
Fitzurse, and the four knights seized him to drag him from the church. 
" Do not touch me, Reginald," shouted the Primate, " pander that you 
are, you owe me fealty ;" and availing himself of his personal strength 
he shook him roughly off. " Strike, strike," retorted Fitzurse, and blow 
after blow struck Thomas to the ground. A retainer of Ranulf de Broc 
with the point of his sword scattered the Primate's brains on the 
ground. "Let us be off," he cried triumphantly, "this traitor will 
never rise again." 

The brutal murder was received with a thrill of horror throughout 
Christendom; miracles were wrought at the martyr's tomb; he was 
canonized, and became the most popular of English saints ; but Henry's 
active negotiations with the Papacy averted the excommunication which 
at first threatened to avenge the deed of blood. The Constitutions of 
Clarendon were in form partially annulled, and liberty of canonical 
election restored to bishoprics and abbacies. In reality, however, the 
victory remained with the King. Throughout his reign ecclesiastical 
appointments were practically in his hands, the bishops remained 
faithful to the royal cause, while the King's court asserted its power 
over the episcopal jurisdiction. The close of the great struggle left 
Henry free to complete his great work of legal reform. He had already 
availed himself of the expedition against Toulouse to deliver a crushing 
blow at the baronage by the commutation of their personal services in 
the field for a money payment, a " scutage," or " shield money," for 
each fief. The King thus became master of resources which enabled 
him to dispense with the military support of his tenants, and to main- 
tain a force of mercenary soldiers in their place. The diminution of 
the military power of the nobles had been accompanied by measures 
which robbed them of their legal jurisdiction. The circuits of the judges 
were restored, and instructions were given them to enter the manors 
of the barons and make inquiry into their privileges ; while the office of 
sheriff was withdrawn from the great nobles of the shire and entrusted 
to the lawyers and courtiers who already furnished the staff of justices. 
The resentment of the barons found an opportunity of displaying itself 
when the King's eldest son, whose coronation had played so great a 
part in the history of Archbishop Thomas, suddenly took refuge with the 
King of France, and demanded to be put in possession of his English 
realm. France, Flanders, and Scotland joined the league against 
Henry, a French army appeared beneath the walls of Rouen, while the 
King's younger sons, Richard and Geoffry, took up arms in Acqui- 



io6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



taine. In England a descent of Flemish, mercenaries under the Earl 
of Leicester had been repulsed by the loyal justiciaries near S. 
Edmundsbury; but Lewis had no sooner invaded Normandy than the 
whole extent of the danger was revealed. The Scots crossed the 
border, Roger de Mowbray rose in revolt in Yorkshire, Earl Fen-ars 
in the midland shires, Hugh Bigod in the eastern counties, while a 
Flemish fleet prepared to support the insurrection by a descent upon 
the coast. The murder of ArGhbishop Thomas still hung around 
Henry's neck, and his first act in hurrying to meet these perils in 
England was to prostrate himself before the shrine of the new martyr, 
and to submit to a public scourging in expiation of his sin. But his 
penance was hardly wroug"^:/- when all danger was dispelled by a 
series of triumphs. The King o^ Scotland, William the Lion, surprised 
by the Enghsh under cover oi a mist, fell into the hands of his 
justiciary, Ranulf de Glanvil, and at the retreat of the Scots the 
English rebels hastened to lay down their arms. With the army of 
mercenaries which he had brought to England, Henry was able to 
raise the siege of Rouen, and to reduce his sons to submission. The 
revolt of the baronage, easily as it had been subdued, became the pre- 
text for fresh blows at their power. The greatest of these was his 
Assize of Arms, which restored the national militia to the place which 
it had lost at the Conquest. The substitution of scutage for military 
service had practically freed the crown from the support of the 
baronage and their feudal retainers ; the assize substituted for this 
feudal organization the older military obligation of every freeman to 
serve in the defence of the realm. Every knight was forced to aiTn 
himself with coat of mail, and shield and lance ; every freeholder 
with lance and hauberk ; every burgess and poorer freeman with lance 
and iron helmet. This universal levy of the armed nation was wholly 
at the disposal of the King for purposes of defence. 

The measures we have named were only part of Henry^s legislation. 
His reign, it has been truly said, " initiated the rule of law," as dis- 
tinct from the despotism — tempered in the case of his grandfather by 
routine — of the earlier Norman kings. It was in successive "Assizes," 
brief codes issued with the sanction of the great councils of barons and 
prelates he summoned year by year, that he perfected, by a system of 
reform.s, the administrative measures which had begun with Henry 
the First. The fabric of our judicial legislation commences with the 
Assize of Clarendon, the first object of which was to provide for the 
order of the realm by reviving the old English system of mutual 
security, or frank-pledge. No stranger might abide in any place save 
a borough, and there but for a single night, unless sureties were gvj^Vi 
for his good behaviour; and the list of such strangers was to be sub- 
mitted to the itinerant justices. In the provisions of this assize for 
the repression of crime we find the origin of trial by jury, so often 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



107 



attributed to earlier times. Twelve lawful men of each hundred, with 
four from each township, were sworn to present those who were known 
or reputed as criminals within their district for trial by ordeal. The 
jurors were thus not merely witnesses, but sworn to act as judges also 
in determining the value of the charge, and it is this double character 
of Henry's jurors that has descended to our " grand jury," who still 
remain charged with the duty of presenting criminals for trial after 
examination of the witnesses against them. Two later steps brought 
the jury to its modern condition. Under Edward the First witnesses 
acquainted with the particular fact in question were added in each case 
to the general jury, and at a later time by the separation of these two 
classes of jurors the last became simpl^, " witnesses," without any 
judicial power, while the first ceased to be witnesses at all, and, as our 
modern jurors, remained only judges ol the testimony given. With this 
assize, too, the practice which had prevailed from the earliest English 
times, of "compurgation," passed away. Under this system the 
accused could be acquitted of the charge by the voluntary oath 
of his neighbours and kinsmen ; but for the fifty years which 
followed the Assize of Clarendon his trial, after the investigation 
of the grand jury, was found solely in the ordeal or "judgment of 
God." Innocence could be proved by the power of holding hot iron 
in the hand, or by sinking when flung into the water, for swimming 
was a proof of guilt. The ordeal by battle or judicial combat intro- 
duced by the Normans had, as we have seen in the case of S. Ed- 
mundsbury, been confined to the feudal manors. It was the abo- 
lition of the whole system of ordeal by the Council of Lateran which 
led the way to the establishment of what is called a " petty jury " for 
the final trial of the prisoner. The Assize of Clarendon was expanded 
in that of Northampton, issued as instructions to the judges after the 
rebellion of the Barons. Henry, as we have seen, had restored the 
King's court and the occasional circuits of its justices : at the Council 
of Northampton he rendered this institution permanent and regular 
by dividing the kingdom into six districts, to each of which he assigned 
three itinerant justices. The circuits thus defined correspond roughly 
with those that exist at the present day. The primary object of these 
circuits was undoubtedly financial, but the judicial functions of the 
judges were extended by the abolition of all feudal exemptions from 
their jurisdiction. The chief danger of the new system lay in the 
opportunities it afforded to judicial conniption ; and so great were its 
abuses that Henry was soon forced to restrict for a time the number 
of justices to five — reserving appeals from their court to himself in 
council. It is from this Upper Court of Appeal, which he thus erected, 
that the judicial powers now exercised by the Privy Council are de- 
rived, as well as the equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor. In the 
next century it becomes the great council of the realm, from which 



loS 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VIII. 

Henry the 
Second. 
1154- 
1189. 



Beath of 
Henry 

the 
Second. 



Richard. 
the First. 



1190-1194. 



the Privy Council drew its legislative, and the House of Lords its 
judicial character. The court of Star Chamber and the Judicial Com- 
mittee of the Privy Council are later offshoots of Henr/s creation. 
The King's court, which became inferior to this higher jurisdiction, 
divided after the Great Charter into the three distinct courts of the 
King's Bench, the Exchequer, and the Common Pleas, which by the 
close of the reign of Henry the Third received distinct judges, and 
became for all purposes separate. 

Henry was now in appearance thoroughly master of his dominions, 
and his invasion of Ireland had added that island to the possessions 
of his English crown. But the course of triumph and legislation 
was rudely broken by the quarrels and revolts of his sons. The suc- 
cessive deaths of Henry and Geoffry were followed by intrigues 
between Richard, who had been entrusted with Acquitaine, and Philip, 
who had succeeded Lewis on the throne of France. The plot broke 
out at last in actual conflict; Richard did homage to Philip, and the 
allied forces suddenly appeared before Le Mans, from which Henry 
retreated in headlong flight towards Normandy. From a height where 
he halted to look back on the burning city, so dear to him as his birth- 
place, the old King hurled his curse against God: "Since Thou hast 
taken from me the town I loved best, where I was born and bred, and 
where my father lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too — I 
will rob thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." Death was upon 
him, and the longing of a dying man drew him to the home of his race. 
Tours fell as he lay at Saumur, and the hunted King was driven to 
beg mercy from his foes. They gave him the list of the conspirators 
against him : at the head of them was his youngest and best-loved 
son, John. "Now," he said, as he turned his face to the wall, "let 
things go as they will — I care no more for myself or for the world." 
He was borne to Chinon by the silvery waters of Vienne, and muttering, 
" Shame, shame on a conquered King," passed sullenly away. 

Section IX ^The Fall of the Angevins^ 1189-1204. 

[Authorities. — In addition to those mentioned in the last Section, the Chronicle 
of Richard of Devizes, and the *'Itinerarium Regis Ricardi," edited by Pro- 
fessor Stubbs, are useful for Richard's reign. Rigord's **Gesta Philippi," and 
the * ' Philippis " of Brito Armoricus, the chief authorities on the French side, 
are given in Duchesne, *' Hist. Franc. Scriptores," vol. v.] 



We need not follow Richard in the Crusade which occupied the be-| 
ginning of his reign, and which left England for four years without a 
ruler, — in his quarrels in Sicily, his conquest of Cyprus, his victory at 
Jaffa, his fruitless march upon Jerusalem, the truce he concluded with 
Saladin, his shipwreck as he returned, or his two imprisonments m 



II.] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS, 



lOQ 



Germany. Freed at last from his captivity, he found himself among 
dangers which he was too clear-sighted to undervalue. Less wary 
than his father, less ingenious in his political conceptions than 
John, Richard was far from a mere soldier. A love of adventure, 
a pride in sheer physical strength, here and there a romantic generosity, 
jostled roughly with the craft, the unscrupulousness, the violence of his 
race ; but he was at heart a statesman, cool and patient in the execu- 
tion of his plans as he was bold in their conception. " The devil is 
loose ; take care of yourself," Philip had written to John at the news 
of the King^s release. In the French king's case a restless ambition 
was spurred to action by insults which he had borne during the Cru- 
sade, and he had availed himself of Richard's imprisonment to invade ! 
Normandy. John, traitor to his brother as to his father, had joined 
his alliance ; while the Lords of Acquitaine rose in revolt under the 
troubadour Bertrand de Born. Jealousy of the rule of strangers, weari- 
ness of the turbulence of the mercenary soldiers of the Angevins or of 
the greed and oppression of their financial administration, combined 
with an impatience of their firm government and vigorous justice to 
alienate the noblesse of their provinces on the Continent. Loyalty 
among the people there was none ; even Anjou, the home of their race, 
drifted towards Philip as steadily as Poitou. England was drained by 
the tax for Richard's ransom, and irritated by his resumption on his 
return of all the sales by which he had raised funds for his Crusade. 
For some time he could do nothing but hold Philip in check on the 
Norman frontier, surprise his treasure at Fretheval, and reduce to sub- 
mission the rebels of Acquitaine. A truce, which these successes 
wrested from Philip, gave him breathing-space for a final blow at his 
opponent. 

Extortion had wrung from England wealth which again filled the 
royal treasury, and Richard's bribes detached Flanders from the French 
alliance, and united the Counts of Chartres, Champagne, and Bou- 
logne with the Bretons in a revolt against Philip. Otho, a nephew of 
Richard's, was now one of two rival claimants of the Empire, and 
William Longchamp of Ely was busy knitting an alliance which would 
bring the German lances to bear on the King of Paris. But the security 
of Normandy was requisite to the success of these wider plans, and 
\ Richard saw that its defence could no longer rest on the loyalty of 
the Norman people. His father might trace his descent through 
Matilda from the line of Hrolf, but the Angevin ruler was in fact a j 
stranger to the Norman. Nor did Henry appeal to his subjects' loyalty; 
he held them, as he held his other provinces, by a strictly adminis- 
trative bond, as a foreign master, and guarded their border with 
foreign troops. Richard only exaggerated his father's policy. It was 
impossible for a Norman to recognize his Duke with any real sympathy 
in, the Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the border at the 



Sec. IX. 
The Fall 

OF THE 

Angevins. 
1189- 
1204. 



1194-1196. 



Chitean 
Gaillard. 



msrORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CHA^ 



Sec. IX. 
TnK Fall 

OF THE 

Angevins. 

1189- 
1204.. 



Richard's 
death. 



head of Brabangon mercenaries, in whose camp the old names oi 
the Norm.an baronage were missing, and Merchade, a mere Gascon 
ruftian, held supreme command. The purely military site which 
Richard selected for the new fortress with which he guarded the 
border, showed his realization of the fact that Normandy could now 
only be held in a military way. As a monument of warlike skill his 
" Saucy Castle," Chateau Gaillard, stands first among the fortresses of 
the middle ages. Richard fixed its site where the Seine bends sud- 
denly at Gaillon in a great semicircre to the north, and where the 
valley of Les Andelys breaks the line of the chalk cliffs along its bank. 
Blue masses of woodland crown the distant hills ; within the river 
curve lies a dull reach of flat meadow, round which the Seine, broken 
with green islets, and dappled with the grey and blue of the sky, 
flashes like a silver bow on its way to Rouen. The castle formed a 
part of an entrenched camp which Richard designed to cover his 
Norman capital. Approach by the river was blocked by a stockade 
and a bridge of boats, by a fort on the islet in mid stream, and by 
the tower which the King built in the valley of the Gambon, then an 
impassable marsh. In the angle between this valley and the Seine, on 
a spur of the chalk hills which only a narrow neck of land connects 
with the general plateau, rose, at the height of 300 feet above the river, 
the crowning fortress of the whole. Its outworks and the walls which 
connected it with the tow^n and stockade have for the most part gone, 
but time and the hand of man have done little to destroy the fortifi* 
cations themselves — the fosse, hewn deep into the solid rock, w^ith 
casements hollowed out along its sides, the fluted walls of the citadel, 
the huge donjon looking down on the brown roofs and huddled gables 
of Les Andelys. Even now, in its ruin, we can understand the trium- 
phant outburst of its royal builder as he saw it rising against the sky : 
" How pretty a child is mine, this child of but one year old ! " 

The easy reduction of Normandy on the fall of Chateau Gaillard at 
a later time proved Richard's foresight; but foresight and sagacity were 
mingled in him with a brutal violence and a callous indifference to 
honour. The treaty which interrupted his war with Philip provided 
that Andelys should not be fortified, and three months after its ratifi- 
cation he was building his " Saucy Castle." " I will take it, were its 
walls of iron," Philip exclaimed in wrath as he saw it rise. " I would 
hold it, v/ere the walls of butter," was the defiant answer of his foe. It 
was Church land, and the Archbishop of Rouen laid Normandy under 
interdict at its seizure, but the King met the interdict with mockery, 
and intrigued with Rome till the censure was withdrawn. He was just 
as defiant of a " rain of blood," whose fall scared his courtiers. " Had 
an angel from heaven bid him abandon his work," says a cool obs^erver, 
" he would have answered with a curse." The twelvemonth's hard 
work, in fact, by securing the Norman frontier, set Richard free to deal 



,IL] 



ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS. 



iir 



his long-meditated blow at Philip. Money only was wanting, and the 
King listened with more than the greed of his race to the rumour that 
a treasure had been found in the fields of the Limousin. Twelve 
knights of gold seated round a golden table were the find, it was said, 
of the Lord of Chaluz. Treasure-trove at any rate there was, and 
Richard prowled around the walls, but the castle held stubbornly out 
till the King's greed passed into savage menace ; he would hang all, 
he swore — man, woman, the very child at the breast. In the midst of 
his threats an arrow from the walls struck him down. He died as he 
had lived, pardoning with kingly generosity the archer who had shot 
kim, outraging with hitter mockery the priests who exhorted him to 
repentance and restitution. 

The jealousy of province against province broke out fiercely at his 
death. John was acknowledged as King in England and Normandy, 
while Anjou, Maine, and Touraine did homage to Arthur, the son of 
his elder brother Geoffry, the late Duke of Brittany. The ambition of 
Philip, who protected his cause, turned the day against Arthur ; the 
Angevins rose against the French garrisons with which the French 
King practically annexed the country, and John was at last owned as 
master of the whole dominion of his house. A fresh outbreak of war 
was fatal to his rival ; surprised at the siege of Mirabeau by a rapid 
march of the King, Arthur was taken prisoner to Rouen, and murdered 
there, as men believed, by his uncle's hand. The brutal outrage at 
once roused Poitou in revolt, Anjou and Touraine welcomed Philip, 
and the French king marched straight on Normandy. The ease with 
which its conquest was effected is explained by the utter absence of 
any popular resistance on the part of the Normans themselves. Half 
a century before the sight of a Frenchman in the land would have 
roused every peasant to arms from Avranches to Dieppe, but town 
after town surrendered at the mere summons of Philip, and the con- 
quest was hardly over before Normandy settled down into the most 
loyal of the provinces of France. Much of this w^as due to the wise 
liberality with which Philip met the claims of the towns to indepen- 
dence and self-government, as well as to the overpowering force and 
military ability with which the conquest was effected. But the utter 
absence of all opposition sprang, as v»'e have seen, from a deeper 
cause ; to the Norman, his transfer from John to Philip was a mere 
passing from one foreign master to another, and foreigner for foreigner 
Philip was the less alien of the two. Betv/een France and Norm.andy 
there had been as many years of friendship as of strife ; between 
Norman and Angevin lay a centur}^ of bitterest hate. Moreover, the 
subjection to France was the realization in fact of a dependence which 
had always existed in theory ; Philip entered Rouen as the over-lord of 
its Dukes, while the submission to the house of Anjou. had been the 
most humiliating of all submissions, the submission to an equal. 



112 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. IX. 
The Fall 

OF THE 

Angevins. 
1189- 
1204. 



It was the consciousness of this temper in the Norman people that 
forced John to abandon all hope of resistance on the failure of his 
attempt to relieve Chateau Gaillard, by the siege of which Philip com- 
menced his invasion. The skill with which the combined movements for 
its relief were planned proves the King^s military ability. The besiegers 
were parted into two masses by the Seine ; the bulk of their forces were 
camped in the level space within the bend of the river, while one 
division was thrown across it to occupy the valley of the Gambon, and 
sweep the country around of its provisions. John proposed to cut the 
French army in two by destroying the bridge of boats which formed 
the only communication between the two bodies, while the whole of 
his own forces flung themselves on the rear of the French division en- 
camped in the cul de sac formed by the river-bend, and without any 
exit save the bridge. Had the attack been carried out as ably as it 
was planned, it must have ended in Philip's ruin ; but the two assaults 
were not made simultaneously, and were successively repulsed. The 
repulse was followed by the utter collapse of the military system by 
which the Angevins had held Normandy ; John's treasury was ex- 
hausted, and his mercenaries passed over to the foe. The King's 
despairing appeal to the Duchy itself came too late ; its nobles were 
already treating with Philip, and the towns were incapable of resisting 
the siege train of the French. It was despair of any aid from Nor- 
mandy that drove John over sea to seek it as fruitlessly from England, 
but with the fall of Chateau Gaillard, after a gallant struggle, the pro- 
vince passed without a struggle into the French king's hands. On its 
loss hung the destinies of England, and the interest that attaches one 
to the grand ruin on the heights of Les Andelys is, that it represents 
the ruin of a system as well as of a camp. From its dark donjon and 
broken walls we see not merely the pleasant vale of Seine, but the 
sedgy flats of our own Runnymede. 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



"3 



CHAPTER HI. 

THE GREAT CHARTER. 

1204— 1265. 

Section I.— English Iiiterature under the Norman and 
Angevin Kings. 

[Authorities. — For the general literature of this period, see Mr. Morley's 
** English Writers from the Conquest to Chaucer," vol. i. part ii. The 
prefaces of Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock to his collected works in the Rolls 
Series give all that can be known of Gerald de Barri. The Poems of Walter 
Map have been edited by Mr. Wright for the Camden Society ; Layamon, by 
Sir F. Madden.] 

It is in a review of the literature of England during the period 
that we have just traversed that we shall best understand the new 
English people with which John, when driven from Normandy, found 
himself face to face. 

In his contest with Beket, Henry the Second had been powerfully 
aided by the silent revolution which now began to part the purely 
literary class from the Church. During the earlier ages of our history 
we have seen literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and 
protecting itself against the ignorance and violence of the time under 
ecclesiastical privileges. With but two exceptions, in fact, those of 
iElfred and Ethelweard, all our writers from Bseda to the days of 
the Angevins are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which fol- 
lowed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical revival ; the intellectual 
impulse which Bee had given to Normandy travelled across the Chan- 
nel with the new Norman abbots who were established in the greater 
English monasteries ; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief 
works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were copied and illumi- 
' nated, the lives of saints compiled, and entries noted in the monastic 
! chronicle, formed from this time a part of every religious house of any 
I importance. Fruitful of results as it had been in France, the philo- 
' sophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm produced no Enghsh 
j work of theology or metaphysics ; it is characteristic of the national 
\ temper that the literary revival at once took the older historical form. 

IAt Durham, Turgot and Simeon threw into Latin shape the national 
annals to the time of Henry the First with an especial regard to 
northern affairs, while the earlier events of Stephen's reign w^ere noted 
down by two Priors of Hexham in the wild border-land between Eng- 
1 I 



114 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 

English 
Literature 
under the 

Norman 
AND Ange- 
vin Kings. 



Litera- 
ture and 
theConrt. 

Will lain. 

of Mnlnies- 

biny. 



The Court 
historians. 



land and the Scots. These, however, were the colourless jottings of 
mere annalists ; it was in the Scriptorium of Canterbury, in Osbern^s 
lives of the English saints Dunstan and Elfeg, or in Eadmer's record 
of the struggle of Ansehn against the Red King and his successor, that 
we see the first indications of a distinctively English feeling telling 
on the new literature. The national impulse is yet more conspicuous 
in the two historians that followed. The war-songs of the English 
conquerors of Britain were preserved by Henry, the Archdeacon of 
Huntingdon, who wove them into annals compiled from Bseda and 
the Chronicle ; while William, the librarian of Malmesbury, has indus- 
triously collected the lighter ballads which embodied the popular tra- 
ditions of the English Kings. The revival of English patriotism is yet 
more distinctly visible in the Sayings of Alfred and the legend of 
Hereward's struggle in the Fens of Ely, whose composition may pro- 
bably be placed in the reign of Henry the Second. 

We may see the tendency of English literature at the close of the 
Norman period in William of Malmesbury. In himself, as in his 
work, he marks the fusion of the conquerors and the conquered, for 
he was of both English and Norman parentage, and his sympathies 
were as divided as his blood. In the form and style of his writings 
he shows the influence of those classical studies which were now 
revivmg throughout Christendom. Monk as he is, he discards the 
older ecclesiastical models and the annalistic form. Events are 
grouped together with no strict reference to time, while the lively 
narrative flows rapidly and loosely along, with constant breaks of 
digression, over the general history of Europe and the Church. It is 
in this change of historic spirit that William takes his place as first 
of the more statesmanlike and philosophic school of historians who 
began soon to arise in direct connection with the Court, and amongst 
whom the author of the chronicle which commonly bears the name 
of " Benedict of Peterborough," with his continuator Roger of How- 
den, are the most conspicuous. Both held judicial oflices under Henry 
the Second, and it is to their position at Court that they owe the ful- 
ness and accuracy of their information as to affairs at home and 
abroad, their copious supply of official documents, and the purely 
political temper with which they regard the conflict of Church and 
State in their time. The same freedom from ecclesiastical bias, com- 
bined with remarkable critical ability, is found in the history of 
William, the Canon of Newborough, From the time of Henry the 
First, in fact, the English court had become the centre of a distinctly 
secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, the justiciar of 
Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the 
royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Nea!, on the Exchequer, is the earliest 
on English government. Romance had long before taken root in the 
court of Henry the First, where, under the patronage of Queen Maud, 



ill.l 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



115 



the " Dreams of Arthur," so long cherished by the Celts of Brittany, 
which had travelled to Wales in the train of the exile Rhys ap 
Tewdor, took shape in the History of the Britons by Geoffry of Mon- 
mouth. Myth, legend, tradition, the classical pedantry of the day, 
the Welsh dreams of future triumph over the Saxon, the memories of 
the Crusades and of the world-wide dominion of Charles the Great, 
were mingled together by this daring fabulist in a work whose popu- 
larity became at once immense. Alfred of Beverly transferred his in- 
ventions into the region of sober histoiy, while two Norman trouveurs, 
Gaimar and Wace, translated them into French verse. So complete 
was the credence they obtained, that Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury 
was visited by Henry the Second, while the child of his son Geoffry 
and of Constance of Brittany bore the name of the Celtic hero. Out 
of Geoifry's creation grew little by little the poem of the Table Round. 
Brittany, which had mingled with the story of Arthur the older and 
more mysterious legend of the Enchanter Merlin, lent that of Lancelot 
to the wandering minstrels of the day, who moulded it, as they wan- 
dered from hall to hall, into the familiar song of knighthood wrested 
from its loyalty by the love of woman. The stories of Tristram and 
Gawayne, at first as independent as that of Lancelot, were drawn with 
it into the whirlpool of Arthurian romance ; and when the Church, 
jealous of the popularity of the legends of chivalry, invented as a 
counteracting influence the poem of the Sacred Dish, the San Graai 
which held the blood of the Cross, invisible to all eyes but those of 
the pure in heart, the genius of a Court poet, Walter de Map, v/ove 
the rival legends together^ sent Arthur and his knights wandering 
over sea and land in the quest of the San Graal, and crowned the 
work by the figure of Sir Galahad, the type of ideal knighthood, with- 
out fear and without reproach-. 

Walter was one of two remarkable men who stand before us as the 
representatives of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious 
criticism which followed the growth of romance and the appea.rance of 
a freer historical tone in the court of the two Henries. Born on the 
Welsh border, a student at Paris, a favourite with the . King, a royal 
chaplain, justiciary, and ambassador, the genius of Walter de Map was 
as various as it was prolific. He is as much at his ease in sweeping 
together the chit-chat of the time in his "Courtly Trifles," as in creating 
the character of Sir Galahad. But he only rose to his fullest strength 
when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform, 
and embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his 
'* Bishop Goliath.^' The whole spirit of Henry and his Court in their 
struggle with Beket is reflected and illustrated in the apocalypse and 
confession of this imaginary prelate. Picture after picture strips the 
veil from the corruption of the mediaeval Church, its indolence, its 
thirst for gain, its secret immorality. The whole body of the clergy, 

I 2 



ii6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



English 
Literature 
under the 

Norman 
AND Ange- 
vin Kings. 



from Pope to hedge-priest, is painted as busy in the chase for gain ; 
what escapes the bishop is snapped up by the archdeacon, what escapes 
the archdeacon is nosed and hunted down by the dean, while a host 
of minor officials prowl hungrily around these greater marauders. Out 
of the crowd of figures which fills the canvas of the satirist, pluralist 
^^icars, abbots " purple as their wines," monks feeding and chattering 
together like parrots in the refectory, rises the Philistine Bishop, light 
of purpose, void of conscience, lost in sensuality, drunken, unchaste, 
the Goliath who sums up the enormities of all, and against whose 
forehead this new David slings his sharp pebble of the brook. Power- 
less to hold the wine-cup, Goliath trolls out the famous drinking-song 
that a hundred translations have made familiar to us : — 

*' Die I must, but let me die drinking in an inn ! 

Hold the v/ine-cup to my lips sparkling from the bin ! 
So, when angels liutter down to take me from my sin, 
* Ah, God have mercy on this sot,' the cherubs will begin! " 

The spirit of criticism which assailed in Walter the ecclesiastical 
system of the day, ventured in Gerald de Barri to attack its system of 
civil government. Gerald is the father of our popular literature, as he 
is the originator of the political and ecclesiastical pamphlet. Welsh 
blood (as his usual name of Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with 
Norman in his veins, and something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike 
through his writings and his life. A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming 
archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most trouble- 
some of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of ail 
the authors of his time. In his hands the stately Latin tongue took 
the vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur's verse. Reared as he 
had been in classical studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside. 
" It is better to be dumb than not to be understood," is his character- 
istic apology for the novelty of his style : " new times require new 
fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the old and dry method of 
some authors, and aimed at adopting the fashion of speech which is 
actually in vogue to-day." His tract on the conquest of Ireland and 
his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two journeys under- 
taken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin, illustrate 
his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and his good 
sense. They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we find in 
the correspondence of a. modern journal. There is the same modem 
tone in his poHtical pamphlets ; his profusion of jests, his fund of 
anecdote, the aptness of his quotations, his natural shrewdness ^and 
critical acumen, the clearness and vivacity of his style, are backed by 
a fearlessness and impetuosity that made him a dangerous assailant 
even to such a ruler as Henry the Second. The invectives in which 
Gerald poured out his resentment against the Angevins are the cause 
of half the scandal about Henry and his sons which has found its way 



I 



Ill] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



"7 



into history. His life was wasted in an ineffectual struggle to secure 
the see of St. David's, but the pungent pen of the pamphleteer played 
its part in rousing the spirit of the nation to its struggle with the 
crown. 

It is only, however, as the writings of Englishmen that Latin or 
French works like these can be claimed as part of English literature. 
Banished from Court by the Conquest, superseded in legal documents 
by Latin, the Enghsh tongue ceased to be literary. The spoken tongue 
of the nation at large remained of course English as before ; William 
himself had tried to learn it, that he might administer justice to his 
subjects ; but, like all popular dialects when freed from the control of 
a ^\Titten literature, it tended to lose its grammatical complexities of 
gender and inflexion, while a few new words crept in from the language 
of the conquerors. One great monument indeed of English prose, the 
English Chronicle itself, lingered on in the Abbey of Peterborough, but 
it died out amidst the miseries of Stephen's reign, and as a ^vritten 
language English was silent for more than half a century. Its revival 
coincides with the loss of Normandy and the return of John to his 
island realm. " There was a priest in the land whose name was Laya- 
mon ; he was son of Leovenath : may the Lord be gracious to him I 
He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on the bank of Severn (good it 
seemed to him !) near Radstone, where he read books. It came in 
mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble 
deeds of England, what the men were named, and whence they came, 
who first had English land." Journeying far and wide over the land, 
the priest of Earnley found Basda and Wace, the books too of S. Albin 
and S. Austin. " Layamon laid down these books and turned the 
leaves; he beheld them lovingly: may the Lord be merciful to him ! 
Pen he took with fingers and wrote a book-skin, and the true word set 
together and compressed the three books into one." Layamon's church 
is now Areley, near Bewdley, in Worcestershire ; his poem was in fact 
an ampHfied " Brut," with insertions from Bseda. Historically it is 
worthless, but as a monument of our language it is beyond all price. 
After a sleep of half a century English woke up unchanged. In more 
than thirty thousand lines less than fifty Norman words are to be 
found. Even the old poetic tradition remains the same ; the allite- 
rative metre of the earlier verse is only slightly affected by rhyme, the 
similes are the few natural similes of Csedmon, the battles are painted 
with the same rough, simple joy. It is by no mere accident that the 
English tongue thus wakes again into written life on the eve of the 
great struggle between the nation and its King. The artificial forms 
imposed by the Conquest were falling away from the people as from 
its literature, and a new England, quickened by the Celtic vivacity of 
de Map and the Norman daring of Gerald, stood forth to its conflict 
with John. 



English 

LlTERATURr? 

UNDER rm? 

Norman 
AND Ange- 
vin Kings 



ii8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAP. 



Section II John, I204-1215. 

[AutJiorities . — Our chief source of information is the ** Chronicle of Roger 
of Wendover," the first of the S. Alban's annahsts, wliose work was subse- 
quently revised and co4itinued in a more patriotic tone by another monk of the 
same abbey, Matthew Paris. The Annals of Waverley, Dunstable, and Burton 
are all important for the period. The great series of the Royal Rolls, patent 
and other, begin now to be of the highest value. The French authorities as 
before. For Langton, see Hook's biography in the ** Lives of the Arch- 
bishops." The best modern account of this reign is in Mr. Pearson's *' History 
of England," vol. ii.] 



"Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John." 
The terrible verdict of the King's contemporaries has passed into the 
sober judgment of history. Externally John possessed all the quick- 
ness, the vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm 
which distinguished his house. He was fond of books and learned 
men, he was the friend of Gerald as he was the student of Pliny. 
He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of winning the love of 
Avomen. But in his inner soul John was the worst outcome of the 
Angevins. He united into one mass of wickedness their insolence, 
their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their 
shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical indifference to honour 
or truth. In mere boyhood he had torn with brutal levity the beards 
of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their lord. His ingra- 
titude and perfidv had brought down his father's hairs with sorrow to 
the grave. To his brother he had been the worst of traitors. All 
Christendom believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur 
of Brittany. He had abandoned one wife and was faithless to another. 
Plis punishments were refinements of cruelty, the starvation of chil- 
dren, the crushing old men under copes of lead. His court was a 
brothel where no woman was safe from the royal lust, and where his 
cynicism loved to publish the news of his victims' shame. He was as 
craven in his superstition as he was daring in his impiety. He scoffed 
at priests and turned his back on the mass, even amidst the solemni- 
ties of his coronation, but he never stirred on a journey without hang- 
ing relics round his neck. But with the supreme wickedness of his 
race he inherited its profound abihty. His plan for the rehef of 
Chateau Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur's 
hopes at Mirabeau, showed an inborn genius for war. In the rapidity 
and breadth of his political combinations he far surpassed the states- 
men of his time. Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern 
the difficulties of his position, and inexhaustible in the resources with 
which he met them. The overthrow of his continental power only 



I 



IIL] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



119 



spurred him to the formation of a great league which all but brought 
Phihp to the ground ; and the sudden revolt of all England was par 
ried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy. The closer study of 
John's history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with 
which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson 
of his life rests on the fact that it was no weak and indolent voluptuary, 
but the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins who lost Normandy, 
became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair 
against English freedom. 

The whole energies of the King were bent on the recovery of his lost 
dominions on the Continent. He impatiently collected money and men 
for the support of the adherents of the house of Anjou, who were still 
struggling against the arms of France in Poitou and Guienne, and had 
assembled an army at Portsmouth in the summer of 1205, when his 
project was suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Pri- 
mate and the Earl Mareschal. So completely had both the baronage 
and the Church been humbled by his father, that the attitude of their 
representatives indicated the new spirit of national freedom which was 
rising around the King. John at once braced himself to the struggle. 
The death of Hubert Walter, a few days after this successful protest, 
enabled him, as it seemed, to neutralize the opposition of the Church 
by placing a creature of his own at its head. John de Grey, Bishop of 
Norwich, was elected by the monks of Canterbury at his bidding and 
enthroned as Primate. In a previous though informal gathering, how- 
ever, the convent had already chosen its sub-prior, Reginald, as Arch- 
bishop, and the rival claimants hastened to appeal to Rome, br.t the 
result of their appeal was a startling one both for themselves and for the 
King. Innocent the Third, who now occupied the Papal throne, had 
pushed its claims of supremacy over Christendom further than any of 
his predecessors : resolved to free the Church of England from the royal 
tyranny, he quashed both the contested elections, and commanded 
the monks who appeared before him to elect in his presence Stephen 
Langton to the archiepiscopal see. Personally, a better choice could 
not have been made, for Stephen was a man who by sheer weight of 
learning and holiness of life had risen to the dignity of Cardinal, and 
whose after career placed him in the front rank of English patriots. 
But in itself the step was a violent usurpation of the rights both of the 
Church and of the crown. The King at once met it with defiance, and 
replied to the Papal threats of interdict if Langton were any longer 
excluded from his see, by a counter threat that the interdict should be 
followed by the banishment of the clergy and the mutilation of every 
Italian he could seize in the realm. Innocent, however, was not a man 
to draw back from his purpose, and the interdict fell at last upon the 
land. All worship save that of a few privileged orders, all administra- 
tion of the Sacrament save that of private baptism, ceased over ths 



Sec. II. 

John. 
2204.- 
1216. 



The 
interdict. 



1208. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



length and breadth of the country : the church-bells were silent, the 
dead lay unburied on the ground. The King replied by confiscating 
the lands of the clergy who observed the interdict, by subjecting them, 
in spite of their privileges, to the royal courts, and often by leaving 
outrages on them unpunished. "Let him go," said John, when a 
Welshman was brought before him for the murder of a priest, " he has 
killed my enemy ! " Two years passed before the Pope proceeded 
to the further sentence of excommunication. John was now formally 
cut off from the' pale of the Church ; but the new sentence was met 
with the same defiance as the old. Five of the bishops had fled over 
sea, and secret disaffection was spreading widely, but there was no 
public avoidance of the excommunicated King. An Archdeacon of 
Norwich, who withdrew from his service, was crushed to death under 
a cope of lead, and the hint was sufficient to prevent either prelate or 
noble from following his example. Only one weapon now remained in 
Innocent's hands. An excommunicate king had ceased to be a 
Christian, or to have claims on the obedience of Christian subjects. 
As spiritual heads of Christendom, the Popes had ere now asserted 
their right to remove such a ruler from his throne, and to give it to a 
worthier than he. It was this right which Innocent asserted in the 
deposition of John. He proclaimed a crusade against him, and com- 
mitted the execution of his sentence to Philip of France. John 
met it with the same scorn as before. His insolent disdain suf- 
fered the Roman deacon Pandulf to proclaim his deposition to his 
very face at Northampton. An enormous army gathered at his call 
on Barham Down, and the English fleet dispelled all danger of in- 
vasion on the part of Philip's forces now assembled on the opposite 
coast, by crossing the Channel, capturing some ships, and burning 
Dieppe. 

At the very moment of apparent triumph John suddenly gave 
way. It was the revelation of a danger at home which shook him 
out of his contemptuous inaction. From the first he had guarded 
jealously against any revolt of the baronage during his struggle with 
the Church ; he had demanded the surrender of their children as hos- 
tages for their loyalty ; he had crushed a rising of the Irish nobles in 
the midst of the interdict, and foiled by rapid marches the efforts at 
rebellion which Innocent had stirred up in Scotland and Wales. Bar- 
barous cruelties celebrated his triumph ; he drove De Braose, one of 
the most powerful of the Lords Marchers, to die in exile, while his wife 
and grandchildren were believed to have been starved to death in the 
royal prisons. On the nobles who still clung panic-stricken to the 
court of the excommunicate king, John heaped outrages worse than 
death. Illegal exactions, the seizure of their castles, the preference 
shown to foreigners, were small provocations compared wth his at- 
tacks on the honour of their wives and daughters. Powerless to resist 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



openly, the baronage plunged almost to a man into secret con- 
spiracies ; many promised aid to Philip on his landing, while the King 
of Scots, with Llewellyn of Wales, were busy in corresponding with 
the Pope. It was with the proofs of this universal disaffection in his 
hands that Pandulf summoned John to submit ; but the ambition of 
the King seconded his fears. Vile as he was, he possessed in the 
highest degree the ability of his race, and in the wide combination he 
had long been planning against Philip he showed himself superior, as 
a diplomatist, to Henry himself. The barons of Poitou were already 
sworn to aid him in the South. He had purchased the alliance of the 
Count of Flanders in the North. His nephew Otho, the Papal claimant 
of the Empire, had engaged to bring the knighthood of Germany to 
his aid. But for the success of this vast combination a reconciliation 
with the Pope was indispensable, for none of his allies, and least of all 
Otho, could fight side by side with an excommunicate king. Once 
resolved on, his submission was effected with a shameless cynicism. 
Not only did John promise to receive Langton, and to compensate 
the clergy for their losses, not only did he grovel at the feet of the 
exiled bishops on their return, but, amidst the wonder and disgust of his 
Court, he solemnly resigned both crown and realms into the hands of 
the legate, and received them back again to be held by fealty and 
homage as a vassal of the Pope. 

England thrilled at the news with a sense of national shame such as 
she had never felt before. "He has become the Pope^s man," the 
whole country murmured ; " he has forfeited the very name of King ; 
from a free man he has degraded himself into a serf." But as a politi- 
cal measure the success of John's submission was complete. The 
French army at once broke up in impotent rage, but on its advance 
towards Flanders five hundred English ships under the Earl of Salis- 
bury fell upon the fleet which accompanied it along the coast, and 
utterly destroyed it. The great league which John had so long ma- 
tured at last disclosed itself. The King himself landed in Poitou, 
rallied its barons round him, crossed the Loire in triumph, and re- 
captured Angers, the home of his race. At the same time Otho, rein- 
forcing his German army by the knighthood of Flanders and Boulogne, 
as well as by a body of English mercenaries, invaded France from 
the north. For the moment Philip seemed lost, and yet on the 
fortunes of Philip hung the fortunes of English freedom. But in this 
crisis of her fate France was true to herself and her King ; the towns- 
men marched from every borough to Philip's rescue, priests led their 
flocks to battle with the sacred banners flying at their head. The two 
armies met near the bridge of Bouvines, between Lille and Tournay, 
and from the first the day went against the invaders. The Flemish 
were the first to fly, then the German centre was overwhelmed by the 
numbers of the French, last of all the English on the right were 



122 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Cl-IAP. 



broken by the fierce onset of the Bishop of Beauvais, who charged 
mace in hand, and struck the Earl of Sahsbury to the ground. The 
news of this complete overthrow reached John in the midst of his tri- 
umphs in the South, and scattered his hopes to the winds. He was at 
once deserted by the Poitevin noblesse, and a precipitate retreat alone 
enabled him to return, bafded and humiliated, to his island kingdom. 

It is to the victory of Bouvines that England owes her Great 
Charter. From the hour of his submission to the Papacy, John's ven- 
geance on the barons had only been delayed till he should return a 
conqueror from the fields of France. A sense of their danger nerved 
the nobles to resistance ; they refused to follow the King on his foreign 
campaign till the excommunication were removed, and when it was 
removed they still refused, on the plea that they were not bound to 
serve in wars without the realm. Furious as he was at this new atti- 
tude of resistance, the time had not yet come for vengeance, and John 
sailed for Poitou with the dream of a great victory which should lay 
Philip and the barons alike at his feet. He returned from his defeat 
to find the nobles no longer banded together in secret conspiracies, but 
openly united in a definite claim of liberty and law. The author of 
this great change was the new Archbishop v/hom Innocent had set on 
the throne of Canterbury. From the moment of his landing in Eng- 
land, Stepheii Langton had assumed the constitutional position of the 
Primate as champion of the old English customs and law against the 
personal despotism of the Kings. As Anselm had withstood Wilham 
the Red, as Theobald had rescued England from the lawlessness of 
Stephen, so Langton prepared to withstand and rescue his country 
from the tyranny of John. At his first meeting with the King he 
called on him to swear to the observance of the laws of the Confessor, 
a phrase in which the whole of the national liberties were summed up. 
Churchman as he was, he protested against the royal homage to the 
Pope ; and when John threatened vengeance on the barons for their 
refusal to sail with him to Poitou, Langton menaced him with excom- 
munication if he assailed his subjects by any but due process of law. 
Far, however, from being satisfied with resistance such as this to 
isolated acts of tyranny, it was the Archbishop's aim to restore on a 
formal basis the older freedom of the realm. In a private meeting of 
the barons at S. PauFs he produced the Charter of Henry the First, 
and the enthusiasm wdth which it was welcomed showed the sagacity 
with which the Primate had chosen his ground for the coming struggle. 
All hope, however, hung on the fortunes of the French campaign ; it 
was the victory at Bouvines that broke the spell of terror, and within 
a few days of the King's landing the barons again met at S. Edmunds- 
bury, and swore on the high altar to demand from him, if needful by 
force of arms, the observance of Henry's Charter and of the Con- 
fessor's Law. At Christmas they presented themselves in arms before 



XIL] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



12.^ 



the King, and preferred their claim. The few months that followed 
showed John that he stood alone in the land ; nobles and Churchmen 
were alike arrayed against him, and the commissioners whom he sent 
to plead his cause at the County Courts brought back the news that 
no man would help him against the Charter. At Easter the barons 
again gathered in arms at Brackley, and renewed their claim. " Why 
do they not ask for my kingdom?" cried John in a burst of passion ; 
but the whole country rose as one man at his refusal. London threw 
open her gates to the army of the barons, now organized under Robert 
Fitz-Walter, "the marshal of the army of God and holy Church." 
The example of the capital was at once followed by Exeter and Lin- 
coln ; promises of aid came from Scotland and Wales ; the Northern 
nobles marched hastily to join their comrades in London. With seven 
horsemen in his train, John found himself face to face with a nation 
in arms. He had summoned mercenaries and appealed to his liege 
lord, the Pope ; but summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing 
wrath in his heart the tyrant bowed to necessity, and summoned the 
barons to a conference at Runnymede. 



Section III.— The Great Charter, 1215-1217. 

\^Aufhorities. — The text of the Charter is given by Professor Stuhbs, with 
valuable comments, in his *' Documents Illustrated," &c. Mr. Pearson gives 
a useful analysis of it.] 

An island in the Thames between Staines and Windsor had been 
chosen as the place of conference : the King encamped on one bank, 
while the barons covered the marshy flat, still known by the name of 
Runnymede, on the other. Their delegates met in the island between 
them, but the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's pur- 
pose of unconditional submission. The Great Charter was discussed, 
agreed to, and signed in a single day. 

One copy of it still remains in the British Museum, injured by 
age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, 
shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the 
earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own 
eyes and touch with our own hands, the great Charter to which from 
age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty. 
But in itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish 
any new constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the First 
formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are for the most 
part formal recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes 
introduced by Henry the Second. But the vague expressions of the 
older charters were now exchanged for precise and elaborate provisions. 
The bonds of unwritten custom which the older grants did little more 



Sec. II. 

John. 
1204- 
1215. 






124 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



The 
Charter 
and tlae 
People. 



than recognize had proved too weak to hold the Angevins ; and the 
baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law. It is 
in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of 
traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory and officially de- 
clared by the Primate, to the age of written legislation, of parliaments 
and statutes, which was soon to come. The Church had shown its power 
of self-defence in the struggle over the interdict, and the clause which 
recognized its rights alone retained the older and general form. But all 
vagueness ceases when the Charter passes on to deal with the rights 
of Enghshmen at large, their right to justice, to security of person and 
property, to good government. "No freeman," ran the memorable 
article that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be 
seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way 
brought to ruin : we will not go against any man nor send against him, 
save by legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." " To 
no man will we sell," runs another, " or deny, or delay, right or jus- 
tice." The great reforms of the past reigns were now formally recog- 
nized ; judges of assize were to hold their circuits four times in the year, 
and the Court of Common Pleas was no longer to follow the King in 
his wanderings over the realm, but to sit in a fixed place. But the 
denial of justice under John was a small danger compared with the 
lawless exactions both of himself and his predecessor. Richard had 
increased the amount of the scutage which Henry II. had introduced, 
and applied it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored the Dane- 
geld, or land tax, so often abolished, under the new name of "carucage," 
had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the churches, and 
rated moveables as well as land. John had again raised the rate of 
scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms at his pleasure without 
counsel of the baronage. The Great Charter met this abuse by the 
provision on which our constitutional system rests. With the excep- 
tion of the three customary feudal aids which still remained to the 
crown, " no scutage or aid shall be imposed in our realm save by the 
common council of the realm;" and to this Great Council it was pro- 
vided that prelates and the greater barons should be summoned by 
special writ, and all tenants in chief through the sheriffs and bailiffs, 
at least forty days before. A number of irregular exactions were 
abolished or assessed at a fixed rate, the abuses of wardship were 
reformed, and widows protected against the compulsory marriages to 
which they had been subjected to the profit of the crown. 

The rights which the barons claimed for themselves they claimed for 
the nation at large. The boon of free and unbought justice was a 
boon for all, but a special provision protected the right of the poor. The 
foiieiture of the freeman on conviction of felony was never to include 
his tenement, or that of the merchant his wares, or that of the country- 
man his wain. The means of actual livelihood were to be left even to 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



125 



the worst. The under-tenants or farmers were protected against all law- 
less exactions of their lords in precisely the same terms as these were 
protected against the lawless exactions of the crown. The towns 
were secured in the enjoyment of their municipal privileges, their free- 
dom from arbitrary taxation, their rights of justice, of common de- 
liberation, of regulation of trade. " Let the city of London have all 
its old liberties and its free customs, as well by land as by water. 
Besides this, we will and grant that all other cities, and boroughs, 
and towns, and ports, have all their liberties and free customs." The 
influence of the trading class is seen in two other enactments, by 
which freedom of journeying and trade was secured to foreign mer- 
chants^ and an uniformity of weights and measures was ordered to be 
enforced throughout the realm. There remained only one question, 
and that the most difficult of all ; the question how to secure this order 
which the Charter had established in the actual government of the 
realm. The immediate abuses were easily swept away, the hostages 
restored to their homes, the foreigners banished from the countr>\ 
But it was less easy to provide means for the control of a King whom 
no man could trust, and a council of twenty-four barons were chosen 
from the general body of their order to enforce on John the obser- 
vance of the Charter, with the right of declaring war on the King 
should its provisions be. infringed. Finally, the Charter was published 
throughout the whole country, and sworn to at every hundred-mote 
and town-mote by order from the King. 

" They have given me four-and-twenty over-kings," cried John in a 
burst of fury, flinging himself on the floor and gnawing sticks and straw 
in his impotent rage. But the rage soon passed into the subtle policy of 
which he was a master. Before daybreak he had ridden from Windsor, 
and he lingered for months along the Southern shore, the Cinque Ports 
and the Isle of Wight, waiting for news of the aid he had solicited from 
Rome and from the Continent. It was not without definite purpose that 
he had become the vassal of Rome. While Innocent was dreaming of a 
vast Christian Empire, with the Pope at its head, to enforce justice and 
rehgion on his under-kings, John believed that the Papal protection 
would enable him to rule as tyrannically as he would. The thunders 
of the Papacy were to be ever at hand for his protection, as the armies 
of England .are at hand to protect the vileness and oppression of a 
Turkish Sultan or a Nizam of Hyderabad. His envoys were already 
at Rome, and Innocent, wroth both at the revolt against his vassal 
and the disregard of his own position as over-lord, annulled the Great 
Charter and suspended Stephen Langion from the exercise of his office 
as Primate. Autumn brought a host of foreign soldiers from over sea 
to the King^s standard, and advancing against the disorganized forces 
of the barons, John starved Rochester into submission and marched 
ravaging through the midland counties to the North, while his mer- 



126 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

' Great 

Charter. 
1215- 
1217. 



The Earl 
Mare- 
frchal. 



Fair of 

Lincoln. 

1 2 17. 



cenaries spread like locusts over the whole face of the land. From 
Berwick the King turned back triumphant to coop up his enemies in 
London, where fresh Papal excommunications fell on the barons and 
the city. But the burghers set Innocent at defiance. " The ordering of 
secular matters appertaineth not to the Pope," they said, in words that 
seem like mutterings of the coming Lollardism; and at the advice of 
Simon Langton, the Archbishop's brother, bells swung out and mass 
was celebrated as before. With the undisciplined militia of the country 
and the towns, however, success was impossible against the trained 
forces of the King, and despair drove the barons to seek aid from 
France. Philip had long been waiting the opportunity for his revenge 
upon John, and his son Lewis at once accepted the crown in spite of 
Innocenfs excommunications, and landed in Thanet with a con- 
siderable force. As the barons had foreseen, the French mercenaries 
who constituted John's host refused to fight against the French 
sovereign. The whole aspect of affairs was suddenly reversed. 
Deserted by the bulk of his troops, the King was forced to fall rapidly 
back on the Welsh Marches, while his rival entered London and 
received the submission of the larger part of England. Only Dover, 
under Hubert de Burgh, held out obstinately against Lewis, and John, 
who by a series of rapid marches had succeeded in distracting the 
plan^ of the barons, and relieving Lincoln, now turned southward to 
rescue the great fortress of the coast. In crossing the Wash, however, 
his army was surprised by the tide, and his baggage, with the royal 
treasures, washed away. 

The fever which seized the baffled tyrant in the Abbey of Swineshead 
was inflamed by a gluttonous debauch, and John entered Newark only 
to die. His death changed the whole face of affairs, for his son Henry 
was but a child of ten years old, and the royal authority passed into 
the hands of one who was to stand high among English patriots^ 
WiUiam, the Earl MareschaL The coronation of the boy-king was 
at once followed by the solemn acceptance of the Great Charter, and 
the nobles soon streamed away from the French camp ; for national 
jealousy and suspicions of treason told heavily against Lewis, while 
the pity which was excited by the youth and helplessness of Henr>^ 
was aided by a sense of injustice in burthening the child with 
the iniquity of his father. One bold stroke of the Earl Mareschal 
decided the struggle. A joint army of Frenchmen and English 
barons, under the Count of Perche and Robert Fitz-Walter, were 
besieging Lincoln, when the Earl, suddenly gathering forces from 
the royal castles, marched to its relief. Cooped up in the steep 
narrow streets, and attacked at once by the Earl and the garrison, 
the French fled in hopeless rout ; the Count of Perche fell on the 
field ; Robert Fitz-Walter was taken prisoner. A more terrible de- 
feat crushed the remaining hopes of Lewis. Large reinforcements set 



TIL] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



127 



sail from France to his aid, under the escort of Eustace the Monk, a 
well-known freebooter of the Channel, but in the midst of their voyage a 
small Enghsh fleet, which had set sail from Dover under Hubert de 
Burgh, fell boldly on their rear. The fight admirably illustrates the 
naval warfare of the time. From the decks of the English vessels the 
bowmen of Philip d^Aubeny poured their arrows into the crowded 
masses on board the transports, others hurled quicklime into their 
enemies^ faces, while the more active vessels crashed with their armed 
prows into the sides of the French ships. The skill of the mariners 
of the Cinque Ports decided the day against the larger forces of their 
opponents, and the fleet of Eustace was utterly destroyed. Earl 
Mareschal now closed in upon London, but resistance was really at 
an end. By the treaty of Lambeth, Lewis promised to withdraw from 
England on payment of a sum which he claimed as debt ; his ad- 
herents were restored to their possessions, the liberties of London and 
other towns confirmed, and the prisoners on either side restored to 
liberty. The noble spirit of Earl Mareschal was shown in the wisdom 
and moderation of the terms of submission, and the expulsion of the 
stranger left England beneath the rule of a statesman whose love for 
the Charter was as great as its own. 



Section IV.— The Universities. 

\_Aiithorities. — Huber, in his ** Enghsh Universities," has given the outlines 
of the subject ; its details may he found in Anthony Wood's *' History of the 
University of Oxford." I have borrowed much from two papers of my own 
in " Macmillan's Magazine," on '* The Early History of Oxford." For Bacon, 
see his ** Opera Inedita," in the Rolls Series, with INIr. Brewer's admirable 
introduction, and Dr. Whewell's estimate of him in his History of the Induc- 
tive Sciences.] 



From the turmoil of civil politics we turn to the more silent but 
hardly less important revolution from which we may date our national 
education. It is in the reign of Henry the Third that the English 
universities begin to exercise a definite influence on the intellectual 
life of Englishmen. Of the early history of Cambridge we know 
little or nothing, but enough remains to enable us to trace the 
early steps by which Oxford attained to its intellectual eminence. 
The estabhshrnxnt of the great schools which bore the name of 
Universities w^as everywhere throughout Europe the special mark of 
the new impulse that Christendom had gained from the Crusades. 
A new fervour of study sprang up in the West from its contact 
with the more civilized East. Travellers like Adelard of Bath brought 
back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical science 



128 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad. The earliest classical revival 
restored Caesar and Virgil to the list of monastic studies, and left its 
stamp on the pedantic style, the profuse classical quotations of writers 
like William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury. The scholastic philo- 
sophy sprung up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived 
by the imperialist doctors of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of 
feudal Europe was broken up hke ice before a summer's sun. Wan- 
dering teachers like Lanfranc or Anselm crossed sea and land to 
spread the new power of knowledge. The same spirit of restless- 
ness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older traditions of mankind, 
either local or intellectual, that had hurried half Christendom to the 
tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars 
hurrying to the chosen seats where teachers were gathered together. 
A new power had sprung up in the midst of a world as yet under the rule 
of sheer brute force. Poor as they were, sometimes even of a servile 
race, the wandering scholars who lectured in every cloister were hailed 
as " masters " by the crowds at their feet. Abelard was a foe worthy 
of the menaces of councils, of the thunders of the Church. The 
teaching of a single Lombard was of note enough in England to draw 
down the prohibition of a King. When Vacarius, probably a guest in 
the court of Archbishop Theobald, where Beket and John of Salisbury 
were already busy with the study of the Canon Law, opened lectures on 
it at Oxford, he was at once silenced by Stephen, then at war with the 
Church, and jealous of the power which the wreck of the royal au- 
thority and the anarchy of his rule had already thrown into its hands. 
At the time of the arrival of Vacarius Oxford stood in the first rank 
among English towns. Its town church of S. Martin rose from the 
midst of a huddled group of houses, girt in with massive walls, that lay 
along the dry upper ground of a low peninsula between the streams of 
Cherwell and the upper Thames. The ground fell gently on either 
side, eastward and westward, to these rivers, while on the south a 
sharper descent led down across swampy meadows to the city bridge. 
Around lay a wild forest country, the moors of Cowley and BuUingdon 
fringing the course of Thames, the great woods of Shotover and Bagiey 
closing the horizon to the south and east. Though the two huge towers 
of its Norman castle marked the strategic importance of Oxford as 
commanding the great river valley along which the commerce of 
Southern England mainly flowed, its walls formed, perhaps, the least 
element in its military strength, for on every side but the north the 
town was guarded by the swampy meadows along Cherwell, or by the 
intricate network of streams into which Isis breaks among the meadows 
of Osney. From the midst of these meadows rose a mitred abbey of 
Benedictines, which, with the older priory of S. Fridesv/ide, gave the 
town some ecclesiastical dignity. The residence of the Earl within its 
castle, the frequent visits of English kings to a palace without its walls, 



III.J 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



129 



the presence again and again of important Parliaments, marked its 
political weight within the realm. The settlement of one of the 
wealthiest among the English Jewries in the very heart of the town 
indicated, while it promoted, the activity of its trade. Its burghers 
were proud of a liberty equal to that of London, while the close and 
peculiar alliance of the capital promised the city a part almost equal to 
;its own in the history of England. No city better illustrates the trans- 
formation of the land in the hands of its Norman masters, the sudden 
outburst of industrial effort, the sudden expansion of commerce and 
accumulation of wealth which followed the Conquest. To the west of 
the town rose one of the stateliest of English castles, and in the 
meadows beneath the hardly less stately abbey of Osney. In the fields 
to the north the last of the Norman kings raised his palace of Beau- 
mont. The canons of S. Frideswide reared the church which still 
exists as the diocesan cathedral, while the piety of the Norman 
Castellans rebuilt almost all the parish churches of the city, and 
founded within their new castle walls the church of the Canons of 
S. George. We know nothing of the causes which drew students 
and teachers within the walls of Oxford. It is possible that here as 
elsewhere the new teacher had quickened older educational founda- 
tions, and that the cloisters of Osney and S. Frideswide already 
possessed schools which burst into a larger life under the impulse 
of Vacarius. As yet, however, the fortunes of the University were 
obscured by the glories of Paris. English scholars gathered in thou- 
sands round the chairs of Wilham of Champeaux or Abelard. The 
English took their place as one of the " nations " of the French Univer- 
sity. John of Salisbury became famous as one of the Parisian teachers. 
Beket wandered to Paris from his school at Merton. But through the 
peaceful reign of Henry the Second Oxford was quietly increasing 
in numbers and repute. Forty years after the visit of Vacarius, its 
educational position was fully established. When Gerald of Wales 
read his amusing Topography of Ireland to its students, the most 
learned and famous of the English clergy were, he tells us, to be found 
within its walls. At the opening of the thirteenth century Oxford was 
without a rival in its own country, while in European celebrity it took 
rank with the greatest schools of the Western world. But to realize 
this Oxford of the past we must dismiss from our minds all recollec- 
tions of the Oxford of the present. In the outer aspect of the new 
University there was nothing of the pomp that overawes the fresh- 
man as he first paces the " High," or looks down from the gallery 
of S. Mary's. In the stead of long fronts of venerable colleges, of 
stately walks beneath immemorial elms, history plunges us into the 
mean and filthy lanes of a mediaeval town. Thousands of boys, 
huddled in bare lodging-houses, clustering round teachers as poor as 
themselves in church porch and house porch, drinking, quarrelling, 

K 



Sec. IV. 



I30 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



dicing, begging at the corners of the streets, take the place of the 
brightly-coloured train of doctors and Heads. Mayor and Chancellor 
struggle in vain to enforce order or peace on this seething mass of 
turbulent life. The retainers who follow their young lords to the 
University fight out the feuds of their houses in the streets. Scholars 
from Kent and scholars from Scotland wage the bitter struggle of 
North and South. At nightfall roysterer and reveller roam with torches 
through the narrow lanes, defying bailiffs, and cutting down burghers 
at their doors. Now a mob of clerks plunges into the Jewry, and wipes 
off the memory of bills and bonds by sacking a Hebrew house or two. 
Now a tavern row between scholar and townsman widens into a 
general broil, and the academical bell of S. Mary's vies with the town 
bell of S. Martin's in clanging to arms. Every phase of ecclesiastical 
controversy or political strife is preluded by some fierce outbreak in 
this turbulent, surging mob. When England growls at the exactions 
of the Papacy, the students besiege a legate in the abbot's house at 
Osney. A murderous town and gown row precedes the opening of the 
Barons' War. "When Oxford draws knife," runs the old rhyme, 
" England's soon at strife." 

But the turbulence and stir is a stir and turbulence of life. A keen, 
thirst for knowledge, a passionate poetry of devotion, gathered thou^ 
sands round the poorest scholar, and welcomed the barefoot friar. 
Edmund Rich — Archbishop of Canterbury and saint in later days — 
came, a boy of twelve years old, from the little lane at Abingdon that 
still bears his name. He found his school in an inn that belonged to the 
abbey of Eynsham, where his father had taken refuge from the world 
His mother was a pious woman of his day, too poor to give her boy 
much outfit besides the hair shirt that he promised to wear every 
Wednesday ; but Edmund was no poorer than his neighbours. He 
plunged at once into the nobler life of the place, its ardour for know- 
ledge, its mystical piety. "Secretly," perhaps, at eventide when the 
shadows were gathering in the church of S. Mary's, and the crowd of 
teachers and students had left its aisles, the boy stood before an image 
of the Virgin, and placing a ring of gold upon its finger, took Mary for 
his bride. Years of study, broken by the fever that raged among the 
crowded, noisome streets, brought the time for completing his educa- 
tion at Paris, and Edmund, hand in hand with a brother Robert of 
his, begged his way, as poor scholars were wont, to the great school of 
Western Christendom. Here a damsel, heedless of his tonsure, wooed 
him so pertinaciously that Edmund consented at last to an assignation; 
but when he appeared it was in company of grave academical officials, _ 
who, as the maiden declared in the hour of penitence which followed, i 
" straightway whipped the offending Eve out of her." Still true to 
his Virgin bridal, Edmund, on his return from Paris, became the most 
popular of Oxford teachers. It is to him that Oxford owes her first 



i 



HI.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



Introduction to the Logic of Aristotle. We see him in the httle room ' 
which he hired, with the Virgin's chapel hard by, his grey gown reach- \ 
ing to his feet, ascetic in his devotion, falling asleep in lecture time 1 
after a sleepless night of prayer, with a grace and cheerfulness of! 
manner which told of his French training, and a chivalrous love of 
knowledge that let his pupils pay what they would. ^" Ashes to ashes, 
dust to dust," the young tutor would say, a touch of scholarly pride 
perhaps mingling with his contempt of worldly things, as he threw 
dow^n the fee on the dusty window-ledge, where a thievish student 
would sometimes run off with it. But even knowledge brought its 
troubles ; the Old Testament, which with a copy of the Decretals long 
formed his sole library, frowned down upon a love of secular learning 
from which Edmund found it hard to wean himself. At last, in some 
hour of dream, the form of his dead mother floated into the room 
where the teacher stood among his mathematical diagrams. "What 
are these ? " she seemed t*^ say ; and seizing Edmund^s right hand, she 
drew on the palm three circles interlaced, each of which bore the name 
of one of the Persons of the Christian Trinity. "Be these," she cried, 
as her figure faded away, " thy diagrams henceforth, my son." 

The story admirably illustrates the real character of the new train- 
ing, and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities 
and the spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of 
the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by the power that 
had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested 
on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and 
barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the su- 
premacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by 
accidents of place and social position. The University, on the other 
hand, was a protest against this isolation of man from man. The 
smallest school was European, and not local. Not merely every pro- 
vince of France, but every people of Christendom, had its place among 
the " nations " of Paris or Padua. A common language, the Latin 
tongue, superseded within academical bounds the warring tongues of 
Europe. A common intellectual kinship and rivalry took the place of 
the petty strifes which parted province from province or realm from 
realm. What the Church and Empire had both aimed at and both 
failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast common- 
wealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt himself as 
little a stranger in the "Latin " quarter around Mont St. Genevieve as 
under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars carried the 
writings of Wiclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the work of 
provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but 
even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and 
Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed 
at any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been 

K 2 



Sec IV. 

The 

Univer- 
sities. 



132 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. IV. 

The 

CJniver 

SITIES. 



The Uni- 
versities 
and the 
Church. 



brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere, the spirit of 
natural isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of 
the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity 
of Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with 
Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. At a far later time the rebellion 
of Owen Glyndwyr found hundreds of Welsh scholars gathered round 
its teachers. And within this strangely mingled mass, society and 
government rested on a purely democratic basis. The son of the 
noble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant 
among Oxford scholars. Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, 
pride of ancestry and blood, the very basis on which feudal society 
rested, went for nothing in Oxford lecture-rooms. The University was 
a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were admitted by 
a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the " master." To 
know more than one's fellows was a man^s sole claim to be a " ruler " 
in the schools : and within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal. 
The free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles of S. 
Mary's as the free commonwealth of Florence gathered in Santa Maria 
Novella. All had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in 
the final decision. Treasury and library were at the complete dis- 
posal of the body of masters. It was their voice that named every 
officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even the Chan- 
cellor, their head, who had at first been an officer of the Bishop, 
became an elected officer of their own. 

If the democratic spirit of the Universities threatened feudalism, 
their spirit of intellectual inquiry threatened the Church. To all outer 
seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension 
which mediaeval usage gave to the word " orders " gathered the whole 
educated world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be 
their age or proficiency, scholar and teacher were alike clerks, free 
from lay responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable 
only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. 
This ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its 
head. The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the 
University, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow he had 
sprung into life. He was simply the local officer of the Bishop of 
Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then 
situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only 
rendered more conspicuous the difference of its spirit. The sudden 
expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of 
those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto 
absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of 
classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a greater 
world, the contact with a larger, freer life, whether in mind, in society, 
or in politics, introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of denial into 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



133 



the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for reason the 
supremacy over faith. The Florentine poets discussed with a smile 
the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these, 
Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new 
culture took its most notable form, Frederic the Second, the "World's 
Wonder " of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than 
an infidel. The faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as 
magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous 
contact with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were 
no longer a mere accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of 
Cordova were no mere Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How 
slowly and against what obstacles science won its way we know from 
the witness of Roger Bacon. " Slowly," he tells us, " has any portion 
of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use among the Latins. His 
Natural Philosophy and his Metaphysics, wdth the Commentaries of 
Averroes and others, were translated in my time, and interdicted at 
Paris up to the year a.d. 1237, because of their assertion of the 
eternity of the world and of time, and because of the book of the 
divinations by dreams (which is the third book, De Somniis ct 
Vigiliis), and because of many passages erroneously translated. Even 
his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For S. Edmund, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time vv'ho read the 
Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read 
the book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his writing. So there 
were but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, who were of 
any account in the philosophy of Aristotle ; nay, very few indeed^ 
and scarcely any up to this year of grace 1292." 

We shall see in a later page how fiercely the Church fought against 
this tide of opposition, and how it won back the allegiance of the 
Universities through the begging Friars. But it was in the ranks of 
the Friars themselves that the intellectual progress of the Universities 
found its highest representative. The life of Roger Bacon almost 
covers the thirteenth century ; he was the child of royahst parents, 
who had been driven into exile and reduced to poverty by the civil 
wars. From Oxford, where he studied under Edmund of Abingdon, 
to whom he owed his introduction to the works of Aristotle, he passed 
to the University of Paris, where his whole heritage was spent in 
costly studies and experiments. "From my youth up," he writes, "I 
have laboured at the sciences and tongues. I have sought the friend- 
ship of all men among the Latins who had any reputation for know- 
ledge. J. have caused youths to be instructed in languages, geometry, 
arithmetic, the construction of tables and instruments, and many 
needful things besides." The difficulties in the way of such studies 
as he had resolved to pursue were immense. He was without instru- 
ments or means of experiment. " Without m.athematical instrum.ents 



Sec. IV. 

The 
Univer- 
sities. 



134 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



no science can be mastered," he complains afterwards, "and these 
instruments are not to be found among the Latins, and could not be 
made for two or three hundred pounds. Besides, better tables are in- 
dispensably necessary, tables on which the motions of the heavens are 
certified from the beginning to the end of the world without daily 
labour, but these tables are worth a king's ransom, and could not be 
made without a vast expense. I have often attempted the compo- 
sition of such tables, but could not finish them through failure of 
means and the folly of those whom I had to employ." Books were 
difficult and sometimes even impossible to procure. " The scientific 
works of Aristotle, of Avicenna, of Seneca, of Cicero, and other ancients 
cannot be had without great cost ; their principal works have not been 
translated into Latin, and copies of others are not to be found in 
ordinary libraries or elsewhere. The admirable books of Cicero de 
Republica are not to be found anywhere, so far as I can hear, though I 
have made anxious inquiry for them in different parts of the world, 
and by various messengers. I could never find the works of Seneca, 
though I made diligent search for them during twenty years and more. 
And so it is with many more most useful books connected with the 
sciences of morals." It is only words like these of his own that bring 
home to us the keen thirst for knowledge, the patience, the energy of 
Roger Bacon. He returned as a teacher to Oxford, and at touching 
record of his devotion to those whom he taught remains in the story of 
John of London, a boy of fifteen, whose ability raised him above the 
general level of his pupils. " When he came to me as a poor boy," 
says Bacon, in recommending him to the Pope, " I caused him to be 
nurtured and instructed for the love of God, especially since for 
aptitude and innocence I have never found so towardly a youth. Five 
or six years ago I caused him to be taught in languages, mathematics, 
and optics, and I have gratuitously instructed him with my own lips 
since the time that I received your mandate. There is no one at Paris 
who knows so much of the root of philosophy, though he has not pro- 
duced the branches, flowers, and fruit because of his youth, and 
because he has had no experience in teaching. But he has the means 
of surpassing all the Latins if he live to grow old and goes on as he 
has begun." 

The pride with which he refers to his system of instruction was 
justified by the wide extension which he gave to scientific teaching in 
Oxford. It is probably of himself that he speaks when he tells us 
that " the science of optics has not hitherto been lectured on at Paris 
or elsewhere among the Latins, save twice at Oxford." It was a 
science on v/hich he had laboured for ten years. But his teaching 
seems to have fallen on a barren soil. The whole temper of the age 
was against scientific or philosophical studies. The extension of free- 
dom and commerce, even the diffusion of justice, were opening up 



I 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



1.35 



practical channels for intellectual energy, more inviting because more 
immediately profitable than the path of abstract speculation. The 
older enthusiasm for knowledge was already dying down even at the 
Universities ; the study of law was the one source of promotion, 
whether in Church or state ; theology and philosophy were discredited, 
literature in its purer fonns almost extinct. After forty years of inces- 
sant study, Bacon found himself in his own words " unheard, forgot- 
ten, buried." He seems at one time to have been wealthy, but his 
wealth was gone. "During the twenty years that I have specially 
laboured in the attainment of wisdom, abandoning the path of common 
men, I have spent on these pursuits more than two thousand pounds, 
not to mention the cost of books, experiments, instruments, tables, the 
acquisition of languages, and the like. Add to all this the sacrifices I 
have made to procure the friendship of the wise, and to obtain well- 
instructed assistants." Ruined and baffled in his hopes. Bacon listened 
to the counsels of his friend Grosseteste and renounced the world. 
He became a mendicant friar of the order of S. Francis, an order 
where books and study were looked upon as hindrances to the work 
which it had specially undertaken, that of preaching among the 
masses of the poor. He had written hardly anything. So far was he 
from attempting to write, that his new superiors had prohibited him 
from publishing anything under pain of forfeiture of the book and 
penance of bread and water. But we can see the craving of his mind, 
the passionate instinct of creation which marks the man of genius, in 
the joy with which he seized the strange opportunity which suddenly 
opened before him. " Some few chapters on different subjects, written 
at the entreaty of friends," seem to have got abroad, and were brought 
by one of his chaplains under the notice of Clement the Fourth. The 
Pope at once invited him to write. Again difficulties stood in his way. 
Materials, transcription, and other expenses for such a work as he pro- 
jected, would cost at least ;£6o, and the Pope had not sent a penny. 
He begged help from his family, but they were ruined like himself. 
No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends raised 
the money it was by pawning their goods in the hope of repayment 
from Clement. Nor was this all ; the work itself, abstruse and scientific 
as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular form to 
gain the Papal ear. But difficulties which would have crushed another 
man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy. In 
little more than a year, the Annus Mirabilis of English science^ the 
work was done. The " greater work," itself in modern form a closely 
printed folio, with its successive summaries and appendices m the 
" lesser " and the " third " works (which make a good octavo more) 
were produced and forwarded to the Pope within fifteen months. 

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus 
Majus" is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main plan, in 



136 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the words of Dr. Whewell, is " to urge the necessity of a reform in the 
mode of philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had 
not made a greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of 
knowledge ? which had been unwisely neglected, to discover other 
sources which were yet wholly unknown, and to animate men to the 
undertaking by a prospect of the vast advantages which it offered." 
The development of his scheme is on the largest scale ; he gathers 
together the whole knowledge of his time on every branch of science 
which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he suggests im- 
provements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his after 
works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in 
insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge 
of languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than 
his scientific investigations. But from grammar he passes to mathe- 
matics, from mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the 
name of mathematics was included all the physical science of the time. 
" The neglect of it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passion- 
ately, " hath nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. 
For he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other sciences ; 
and what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its 
proper remedies." Geography, chronology, arithmetic, music, are 
brought into something of scientific form, and the same rapid examina- 
tion \z devoted to the question of climate, to hydrography, geography, 
and astrology. The subject of optics, his own especial study, is treated 
with greater fulness ; he enters into the question of the anatomy of the 
eye, besides discussing the problems which lie more strictly within the 
province of optical science. In a word, the " Greater Work," to borrow 
the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is " at once the Encyclopaedia and the 
Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of the after 
works of Roger Bacon — and treatise after treatise have of late been 
disentombed from our libraries — are but developments in detail of the 
magnificent conception he had laid before Clement. Such a work was 
its own great reward. From the world around Roger Bacon could 
look for, and found, small recognition. No word of acknowledgment 
seems to have reached its author from the Pope. If we may credit a 
more recent story, his writings only gained him a prison from his 
order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old m^an died as he had 
lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll away the obscurity 
that had gathered round his memory, and to place first in the great 
roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon. 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



137 



Section v.— Henry the Third, 1217—1257. 

[Authorities. — The two great authorities for this period are the historio- 
graphers of S. Albans, Roger of Wendover, whose work ends in 1235, and 
his editor and continuator Matthew Paris. The first is full but inaccurate, and 
with strong royal and ecclesiastical sympathies: of the character of Matthew, I 
have spoken at the close of the present Section. The Chronicles of Dunstable, 
Waverley, and Burton (published in Mr. Luard's ** Annales Monastic!") supply 
many details. The *' Royal Letters," edited by Dr. Shirley, with an admirable 
preface, are, like the Patent and Close Rolls, of the highest value. For 
opposition to Rome, see ** Grosseteste's Letters," edited by Mr. Luard.] 



The death of the Earl Mareschal left the direction of affairs in 
the hands of Hubert de Burgh. It was an age of transition, and the 
temper of the new Justiciary was eminently transitional. Bred in the 
school of Henry the Second, he had little sympathy with the Charter 
or national freedom ; his conception of good government, like that of 
his master, lay in a wise personal administration, in the preservation 
of order and law; but he combined with this a thoroughly English 
desire for national independence, a hatred of foreigners, and a reluc- 
tance to waste English blood and treasure in Continental struggles. 
Able as he proved himself, his task was one of no common difficulty. 
Pie was hampered by the constant interference of Rome. A Papal 
legate resided at the English court, and claimed a share in the ad- 
ministration of the realm as the representative of its over-lord and as 
the guardian of the young sovereign. A foreign party, too, was still 
established in the kingdom, and the Court remained eager to plunge 
into foreign wars for the recovery of its lost domains. But it was with 
the general anarchy that Hubert had first to deal. From the time of 
the Conquest the centre of England had been covered with the 
domains of great houses, whose longings were for feudal indepen- 
dence, and whose spirit of revolt had been held in check, partly by 
the stern rule of the Kings, and partly by their creation of a baronage 
sprung from the Court and settled for the most part in the North, the 
" new men " of Henry the First and Henry the Second. The oppres- 
sion of John united both the older and the newer houses in the 
struggle for the Charter, but the character of each remained un- 
changed, and the close of the struggle saw the feudal party break 
out in their old lawlessness and defiance of the Ciown. For a time 
the anarchy of Stephen's days seemed revived. But the royal power 
was still great, and it was backed by the strenuous efforts of Stephen 
Langton. The Earl of Chester, the head of the feudal baronage, who 
had risen in armed rebellion, quailed before the march of Hubert 



£38 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Cka? 



Henry the 
Third. 
1217- 
1267. 



and the Primate's threats of excommunication. A more formidable 
foe remained in the Frenchman, Faukes de Breautd, the sheriff of 
six counties, with six royal castles in his hands, and allied both with 
the rebel barons and Llewelyn of Wales. His castle of Bedford was 
besieged for two months before its surrender, and the stern justice of 
Stephen Langton hung the twenty-four knights and their retainers who 
formed the garrison before its walls while the lay lords, who would 
have spared them, were gone to dinner. The blow was effectual ; the 
royal castles were surrendered by the barons, and the land was once 
more at peace. The services which Stephen Langton rendered to public 
order were small compared with his services to English freedom. 
Throughout his life the Charter was the first object of his care. The 
omission of the articles which restricted the royal power over taxation, 
without the assent of the great Council, in the Charter which was pub- 
lished at Henry's coronation, was doubtless due to the Archbishop's 
absence and disgrace at Rome, for his return is marked by a second 
issue, in which the omission is remedied, while a separate Charter of 
the Forest was added. No man, for the time to come, was to lose 
life or limb for taking the royal venison, and the recent extensions 
of the royal forest were roughly curtailed. The suppression of dis- 
order seems to have revived the older spirit of resistance among the 
royal ministers ; when Langton demanded a fresh confirmation of the 
Charter in Parliament at Oxford, William Brewer, one of the King's 
counsellors, protested that it had been extorted by force, and was 
without legal validity. " If you loved the King, William," the Primate 
burst out in anger, " you would not throw a stumbling in the way of 
the peace of the realm." The King was cowed by the Archbishop's 
wrath, and at once promised the observance of the Charter. Two 
years after, its solemn promulgation was demanded by the Arch- 
bishop and the barons as the price of a new subsidy, and the great 
principle that redress of wrongs precedes a grant to the Crown was 
established as a part of our constitution. 

The death of Stephen Langton left Hubert alone in the administra- 
tion of the kingdom, for the Archbishop had extorted from the Pope 
the withdrawal of the resident Legate. But every year found the 
Justiciary at greater variance with Rome and with the temper of the 
King. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, the constitution of the 
Church took the purely feudal form of the secular kingdoms around it^ 
with the Pope for sovereign, bishops for his barons, the clergy for his 
under vassals. As the King demanded aids and subsidies in case of 
need from his liege men, so it was believed might the head of the 
Church from the priesthood. During the ministry of Hubert, the 
Papacy, exhausted by the long struggle with Frederic the Second, 
grew more and more extortionate in its demands, till the death of 
Langton saw them culminate in a demand of a tenth from the whole 



IIL] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



139 



realm of England. The demand was at once rejected by the baron- 
age, but a threat of excommunication silenced the murmurs of the 
clergy. Exaction followed exaction, the very rights of the lay patrons 
were set aside, and presentations to benefices (under the name of 
*^ reserves ") were sold in the papal market, while Italian clergy were 
quartered on the best livings of the Church. The general indignation 
found vent at last in a wide conspiracy ; letters from " the whole body 
of those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the Romans" were 
scattered over the kingdom by armed men, the tithes gathered for the 
Pope and foreign clergy were seized and given to the poor, the papal 
commissioners beaten, and their bulls trodden under foot. The re- 
monstrances of Rome only revealed the national character of the 
movement \ but as inquiry proceeded, the hand of the minister him- 
self was seen to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while 
the violence was done ; royal letters had been exhibited by the rioters, 
and the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret 
connivance of Hubert de Burgh. The charge came at a time when 
his purely insular poHcy had alienated Henry himself from a minister 
to whom the King attributed the failure of his attempts to regain the 
foreign dominions of his house. An invitation from the barons of 
Normandy had been rejected through Hubert's remonstrances, and 
when a great armament gathered at Portsmouth for a campaign in 
Poitou, it was dispersed for want of transport or supplies. The 
young King drew his sword and rushed madly on the Justiciary, 
whom he charged with treason and corruption by the gold of France, 
but the influence of Hubert again succeeded in deferring the expe- 
dition. The failure of the campaign in the following year, when 
Henry took the field in Brittany and Poitou, was again laid at the 
door of the Justiciary, whose opposition had prevented an engage- 
ment, and the intrigues of Rome were hardly wanting to procure his 
fall. He was dragged from a chapel at Brentwood, where he had 
taken refuge, and a smith was ordered to shackle him. " I will die 
any death," replied the smith, "before I put iron on the man who 
freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." 
On the remonstrance of the Bishop of London Hubert was replaced 
in sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender ; he was 
thrown a prisoner into the Tower, and England was left to the 
rule of royal favourites and to the weakness and caprice of Henry 
himself. 

There was a certain refinement in Henr/s temper which won him 
affection even in the worst days of his rule. The abbey church of 
Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Con- 
fessor, remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron 
and friend of artists and men of letters, and himself skilled in the " gay 
science " of the troubadour. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of 



140 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

Henry the 
Third. 
1217- 
1267. 



1236 



his father he was absolutely free. But he was utterly devoid of the 
political capacity which had been the characteristic of John, as of his 
race. His conception of power lay in the display of an empty and 
profuse magnificence. Frivolous, changeable, impulsive alike in good 
and evil, false from sheer meanness of spirit, childishly superstitious, we 
can trace but one strong political drift in Henry^s mind, a longing to 
recover the Continental dominions of his predecessors, to surround 
himself, like them, with foreigners, and without any express break with 
the Charter to imitate the foreign character of their rule. The death of 
Langton, the fall of Hubert de Burgh, enabled him to indulge his pre- 
ference for aliens, and hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were 
at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial 
and administrative posts about the Court. His marriage with Eleanor 
of Provence was followed by the arrival in England of the Queen's 
uncles : one was enriched by the grant of Richmondshire ; the Savoy 
palace in the Strand still recalls the magnificence of a second, Peter 
of Savoy, who was raised for a time to the chief place in council ; 
Boniface, a third, was promoted to the highest post in the realm save 
the crown itself, the Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The young Primate, 
like his brother, brought with him foreign fashions strange enough to 
English folk. His armed retainers pillaged the markets. His own 
archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground the prior of S. Bartholomew- 
by-Smithfield, who opposed his visitation. London was roused by the 
outrage, and on the King's refusal to do justice a noisy crowd of citizens 
surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth v/ith cries of vengeance. 
The " handsome archbishop," as his followers styled him, was glad to 
escape over sea ; but the brood of Provengals was soon followed by 
the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen, Isabella of Angou- 
leme. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester ; William of Valence 
received the earldom of Pembroke. Even the King's jester was a 
Poitevin. ^ Hundreds of their dependants followed these great lords 
to find a fortune in the English realm. Peter of Savoy brought in 
his train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English 
earls v/ho were in royal wardship were wedded by the King to foreigners. 
The whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men 
ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or 
English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy ; the very retainers of 
the royal household turned robbers, and pillaged foreign merchants 
in the precincts of the Court ; corruption ihvaded the judicature ; 
Henry de Batt, a justiciary, v/as proved to have openly taken bribes 
and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates. Meanwhile the 
royal treasure was squandered in a frivolous attempt to wrest Poitou 
from the grasp of France. The attempt ended in failure and shame. 
At Taillebourg the forces under Henry fled in disgraceful rout before 
the French as far as Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis 






lILj 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



lAl 



the Ninth and a disease which scattered his army, saved Bourdeaux 
from the conquerors. 

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on for twenty 
years unchecked, in defiance of the provisions of the Charter, was 
owing to the disunion and sluggishness of the English baronage. On 
the first arrival of the foreigners, Richard, the third Earl Mareschal, 
had stood forth as their leader to demand the expulsion of the 
strangers from the royal council, and though deserted by the bulk of 
the nobles, he had defeated the foreign forces sent against him, 
released Hubert de Burgh, and forced the King to treat for peace. 
At this critical moment, however, the Earl fell in an Irish skirmish, 
and the barons were left without a head. In the long interval of 
mismle which followed, the financial straits of the King forced him 
to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest Laws were used as a means 
of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant, loans were wrested 
from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free quarters wherever 
it moved. Supplies of this kind, however, were utterly insufficient to 
defray the cost of the King's prodigality. A sixth of the royal revenue 
was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of the Crown 
mounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to appeal 
for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted on 
condition that the King confirmed the Charter. The Charter was con- 
firmed and steadily disregarded ; and the resentment of the barons 
expressed itself in a determined protest and a refusal of further sub- 
sidies. In a few years Henry's necessities drove him to a new appeal, 
and the growing resolution of the nobles to enforce good government 
was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the chief officers 
of the Crown were appointed by the great Council. Henry indignantly 
refused the offer, and sold his plate to the merchants of London. 
From the Church he encountered as resolute an opposition. The 
resistance of the Earl Mareschal had been vigorously backed by 
Edmund Rich, whom we have seen as an Oxford teacher, and who had 
risen to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The threats and remon- 
strances of the Primate had forced the King to an accommodation with 
the Earl, when his death dashed all hope of reform to the ground. 
But the policy of John made it easy to bridle the Church by the 
intervention of the Papacy, and at Henry's request a nuncio now 
appeared in the realm. The scourge of Papal taxation fell again on 
the clergy. After vain appeals to Rome and to the King, Archbishop 
Edmund retired to an exile of despair at Pontigny, and tax-gatherer 
after tax-gatherer, with powers of excommunication, suspension from 
orders, and presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priest- 
hood. The wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. 
Oxford gave the signal by hunting the Papal legate, Otho, out of the 
city, amid cries of "usurer" and "simoniac" from the mob of 



Henry ths 
Third. 
1217- 
1257. 



142 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

Henry the 
Third. 

1217- 
1257. 

1246. 



Matthew 
Paris. 

1200-1259. 



students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne, in the name of the barons, bade Martin, 
a Papal collector, begone out of England. " If you tarry three days 
longer," he added, " you and your company shall be cut to pieces.' 
For a time Henry himself was swept away by the tide of national 
indignation. Letters from the King, the nobles, and the prelates, 
protested against the Papal exactions, and orders were given that no 
money should be exported from the realm. But the threat of inter- 
dict soon drove Henry back on a policy of spoliation, in which he went 
hand in hand with Rome, 

The story of this period of misrule has been preserved for us by 
an annalist whose pages glow with the new outburst of patriotic 
feeling which this common oppression of the people and the clergy 
had produced. Matthew Paris is the greatest, as he is in reality 
the last, of our monastic historians. The school of S. Albans sur- 
vived indeed till a far later time, but the writers dwindle into mere 
annalists whose view is bounded by the abbey precincts, and whose 
work is as colourless as iX. is jejune. In Matthew the breadth and 
precision of the narrative^, the copiousness of his information on 
topics whether national or European, the general fairness and justice 
of his comments, are only surpassed by the patriotic fire and enthu- 
siasm of the whole. He had succeeded Roger of Wendover as 
chronicler at S. Albans ; and the Greater Chronicle with the abridg- 
ment of it which has long passed under the name of Matthew of 
Westminster, a "History of the English," and the "Lives of the 
Earlier Abbots," were only a few among the voluminous works which 
attested his prodigious industry. He was an eminent artist as well as 
an historian, and many of the manuscripts which are preserved are 
illustrated by his own hand. A large circle of correspondents — bishops 
like Grosseteste, ministers like Hubert de Burgh, officials like Alex- 
ander de Swinford — furnished him with minute accounts of political 
and ecclesiastical proceedings. Pilgrims from the East and papal 
agents brought news of foreign events to his scriptorium at S. Albans. 
He had access to and quotes largely from state documents, charters, 
and exchequer rolls. The frequency of the royal visits to the abbey 
brought him a store of political intelligence, and Henry himself con- 
tributed to the great chronicle which has preserved with so terrible a 
faithfulness the memory of his weakness and misgovernment. On 
one solemn feast-day the king recognized Matthew, and, bidding him 
sit on the middle step between the floor and the throne, begged him 
to write the story of the day's proceedings. While on a visit to S. 
Albans he invited him to his table and chamber, and enumerated by 
name two hundred and fifty of the English baronies for his information j 
But all this royal patronage has left little mark on his work. " Thd 
case," as he says, " of historical writers is hard, for if they tell the 
truth they provoke men, and if they write what is false they offend 



ill.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



143 



God." With all the fulness of the school of court historians, such as 
Benedict or Hoveden, Matthew Paris combines an independence and 
.patriotism which is strange to their pages. He denounces with the 
same unsparing energy the oppression of the Papacy and the King. 
His point of view is neither that of a courtier nor of a Churchman, but 
of an Enghshman, and the new national tone of his chronicle is but 
an echo of the national sentiment which at last bound nobles and 
yeomen and Churchmen together into an English people. 



Section VI.— The Friars. 

[Authorities. — Eccleston's Tract on their arrival in England and Adam de 
Marisco's Letters, with Mr. Brewer's admirable Preface, in the '^Monumenta 
Franciscana " of the Rolls series. Grosseteste's Letters in the same series, 
edited by Mr. Liiard. For a general account of the whole movement, see 
Milman's ''Latin Christianity,^' vol. iv. caps. 9 and 10.] 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Friars. 



From the tedious record of misgovernment and political weakness 
which stretches over the forty years we have passed through, we turn 
with relief to the story of the Friars. j 

Never, as we have seen, had the priesthood wielded such boundless | 
power over Christendom as in the days of Innocent the Third and his ; 
immediate successors. But its religious hold on the people was i 
loosening day by day. The old reverence for the Papacy faded away 
before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its ruthless 
exactions, its lavish use of interdict and excommunication for purely 
secular ends, its degradation of the most sacred sentences into means 
of financial extortion. In Italy, the struggle between Rome and 
Frederick the Second had disclosed a spirit of scepticism which 
among the Epicurean poets of Florence denied the immortality of the 
soul, and attacked the very foundations of the faith itself. In Southern 
Gaul, Languedoc and Provence had embraced the heresy of the 
Albigenses, and thrown off all allegiance to the Papacy. Even in 
England, though there were no signs as yet of religious revolt, the 
indignation of the people against Rome, its ceaseless exactions and 
monstrous alliance with the tyranny of the Crown, broke out in 
mutmurs which preluded the open defiance of the Lollards. "The 
Pope has no part in secular matters," had been the reply of London to 
the interdict of Honorius. When the resistance of an Archbishop of 
York to the Papal demands was met by excommunication, " the people 
blessed him the more, the more the Pope cursed him." The noblest 
among English prelates, Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, died at feud 
with the Roman Court ; the noblest of English patriots, Earl Simon of 



144 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Montfort, was soon to die beneath its ban. The same loss of spiritual 
power, the same severance from national feeling, was seen in the 
English Church itself. Plundered and humiliated as they were by 
Rome, the worldliness of the bishops, the oppression of their ecclesi- 
astical courts, the disuse of preaching, the decline of the monastic orders 
into rich landowners, the non-residence and ignorance of the parish 
priests, robbed the clergy of all spiritual influence. The abuses of the 
time foiled even the energ}^ of Grosseteste. His constitutions forbid the 
clergy to haunt taverns, to gamble, to share in drinking bouts, to mix in 
the riot and debauchery of the life of the baronage. But his prohibi- 
tions only witness to the prevalence of the evils they denounce. Bishops 
and deans were withdrawn from their ecclesiastical duties to act as 
ministers, judges, or ambassadors. Benefices were heaped in hundreds 
at a time on royal favourites, like John Mansel. The Popes thrust 
boys of twelve years old into the wealthiest English livings. Abbeys 
absorbed the tithes of parishes, and then served them by half-starved 
vicars. Exemptions purchased from Rome shielded the scandalous; 
lives of canons and monks from all episcopal discipline. 

To bring the world back again within the pale of the Church was the 
aim of two religious orders which sprang suddenly to life at the opening of 
the thirteenth century. The zeal of the Spaniard Dominic was roused at 
the sight of the lordly prelates who sought by fire and sword to win 
the Albigensian heretics to the faith. " Zeal," he cried, ^^must be met 
by zeal, lowliness by lowliness, false sanctity by real sanctity, preaching 
lies by preaching truth." His fiery ardour and rigid orthodoxy were 
seconded by the mystical piety, the imaginative enthusiasm of Francis 
of Assisi. The life of Francis falls like a stream of tender light across 
the darkness of the time. In the frescoes of Giotto or the verse of 
Dante we see him take Poverty for his bride. He strips himself of all, 
he flings his very clothes at his father's feet, that he may be one with 
Nature and God. His passionate verse claims the moon for his sister 
and the sun for his brother, he calls on his brother the Wind, and his 
sister the Water. His last faint cry was a ^^ Welcome, Sister Death ! " 
Strangely as the two men differed from each other, their aim was the 
same, to convert the heathen, to extirpate heresy, to reconcile know- 
ledge with orthodoxy, to carry the Gospel to the poor. The work was 
to be done by the entire reversal of the older monasticism, by seeking 
personal salvation in effort for the salvation of their fellow-men, by 
exchanging the solitary of the cloister for the preacher, the monk for 
the friar. To force the new "brethren" into entire dependence on 
those among whom they laboured the vow of Poverty was turned into a 
stern reality ; the " Begging Friars " were to subsist on the alms of the 
poor, they might possess neither money nor lands, the very houses in 
which they lived were to be held in trust for them by others. The tide 
of popular enthusiasm which welcomed their appearance swept before 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER 



145 



it the reluctance of Rome, the jealousy of the older orders, the opposi- 
tion of the parochial priesthood. Thousands of brethren gathered in 
a few years round Francis and Dominic, and the begging preachers, 
clad in their coarse frock of serge, with the girdle of rope round their 
waist, wandered barefooted as missionaries over Asia, battled with 
heresy in Italy and Gaul, lectured in the Universities, and preached 
and toiled among the poor. 

To the towns especially the coming of the Friars was a religious 
revolution. They had been left for the most part to the worst and 
most ignorant of the clergy, the mass-priest, whose sole subsistence 
lay in his fees. Burgher and artisan were left to spell out what 
religious instruction they might from the gorgeous ceremonies of the 
Church's ritual or the scriptural pictures and sculptures which were 
graven on the walls of its minsters. We can hardly wonder at the 
burst of enthusiasm which welcomed the itinerant preacher, whose 
fervid appeal, coarse wit, and familiar story brought religion into the 
fair and tlie market-place. The Black Friars of Dominic, the Grey 
Friars of Francis, were received with the same delight. As the older 
orders had chosen the country, the Friars chose the town. They had 
hardly landed at Dover before they made straight for London and 
Oxford. In their ignorance of the road the two first Grey Brothers 
lost their way in the woods between Oxford and Baldon, and, fearful 
of night and of the floods, turned aside to a grange of the monks of 
Abingdon. Their ragged clothes and foreign gestures, as they prayed 
for hospitality, led the porter to take them for jongleurs, the jesters 
and jugglers of the day, and the news of this break in the monotony 
of their lives brought prior, sacrist, and cellarer to the door to 
welcome them and witness their tricks. The disappointment was too 
much for the temper of the monks, and the brothers were kicked 
roughly from the gate to find their night's lodging under a tree. But 
the welcome of the townsmen made up everywhere for the ill-will and 
opposition of both clergy and monks. The work of the Friars was 
physical as well as moral. The rapid progress of population within 
the boroughs had outstripped the sanitary regulations of the Middle 
Ages, and fever or plague or the more terrible scourge of leprosy 
festered in the wretched hovels of the suburbs. It was to haunts such 
as these that Francis had pointed his disciples, and the Grey Brethren 
at once fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters of each 
town. Their first work lay in the noisome lazar-houses ; it was 
amongst the lepers that they commonly chose the site of their houses. 
At London they settled in the shambles of Newgate ; at Oxford they 
made their way to the swampy ground between the walls and the 
streams of Thames. Huts of mud and timber, as mean as the huts 
around them, rose within the rough fence and ditch that bounded the 
Friary. The order of Francis made a hard fight against the taste for 

L 



Sec. VI. 



146 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



sumptuous buildings and for greater personal comfort which charac- 
terized the time. " I did not enter into religion to build walls," pro- 
tested an English provincial, when the brethren pressed for a larger 
house ; and Albert of Pisa ordered a stone cloister, which the burgesses 
of Southampton had built for them, to be razed to the ground. " You 
need no little mountains to lift your heads to heaven," was his scornful 
reply to a claim for pillows. None but the sick went shod. An Oxford 
Friar found a pair of shoes one morning, and wore them at matins. 
At night he dreamt that robbers leapt on him in a dangerous pass 
between Gloucester and Oxford, with shouts of " Kill, kill ! " "I am a 
friar," shrieked the terror-stricken brother. " You lie," was the instant 
answer, " for you go shod." The Friar lifted up his foot in disproof, but 
the shoe was there. In an agony of repentance he woke and flung the 
pair out of window. 

It was with less success that the order struggled against the passion 
for knowledge. Their vow of poverty, rigidly interpreted as it was by 
their founders, would have denied them the possession of books or 
materials for study. " I am your breviary, I am your breviary," Francis 
cried passionately to a novice who asked for a psalter. When the 
news of a great doctor's reception was brought to him at Paris, his 
countenance fell. "I am afraid, my son," he replied, "that such 
doctors will be the destruction of my vineyard. They are the true 
doctors who, with the meekness of wisdom, show forth good works for 
the edification of their neighbours." At a later time Roger Bacon, as 
we have seen, was suffered to possess neither ink, parchment, nor 
books ; and only the Pope's injunctions could dispense with the^ 
stringent observance of the rule. But while the work of the Friaraj 
among the sick and lepers drew them, as we have seen in Bacon's life,! 
to the cultivation of the physical sciences, the popularity of their 
preaching soon led them to the deeper study of theology. Within a 
short time after their establishment in England we find as many as 
thirty readers or lecturers appointed at Hereford, Leicester, Bristol, anc 
other places, and a regular succession of teachers provided at eacl' 
University. The Oxford Dominicans lectured on theology in the nave 
of their new church, while philosophy was taught in the cloister. The 
first provincial of the Grey Friars built a school in their Oxford house^ 
and persuaded Grosteste to lecture there. His influence after his pro- 
motion to the see of Lincoln was steadily exerted to secure study; 
among the Friars, and their establishment in the University. He was 
ably seconded by his scholar, Adam Marsh, or de Marisco, under 
whom the Franciscan school at Oxford attained a reputation through-, 
out Christendom. Lyons, Paris, and Cologne borrowed from it their 
professors : it was owing, indeed, to its influence that Oxford now rose 
to a position hardly inferior to that of Paris itself. The three most 
profound and original of the schoolmen — Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus^^ 



II 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



H7 



and Ockham — were among its scholars j and they were followed by a 
crowd of teachers hardly less illustrious in their day, such as Bungay, 
Burley, and Archbishop Peckham. Theology, which had been almost 
superseded by the more lucrative studies of the Canon Law, resumed 
its old supremacy in the schools ; while Aristotle — who, as we have 
seen in the life of Bacon, had been so long held at bay as the most 
dangerous foe of the mediaeval faith — was now turned by the adoption 
of his logical method into its unexpected ally. It was this very 
method that led to that " unprofitable subtlety and curiosity " which 
Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the scholastic philosophy. But 
" certain it is " — to continue the same great thinker's comment on the 
Friars — " that if these schoolmen, to their great thirst of truth and 
unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading and contempla- 
tion, they had proved excellent lights to the great advancement of all 
learning and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors, they un- 
doubtedly did, was to substitute the appeal to reason for the mere 
unquestioning obedience to authority, to insist on the necessity of rigid 
demonstration and an exacter use of words, and to introduce a clear 
and methodical treatment of all subjects into discussion. 

It is to the new clearness and precision which they gave to scientific 
inquiry, as well as to the strong popular sympathies which their very 
constitution necessitated, that we must attribute the influence which 
the Friars undoubtedly exerted on the coming struggle between the 
people and the Crown. Their position throughout the whole contest 
is strongly and clearly marked. The University of Oxford, which had 
now fallen under the direction of their teaching, stood first in its 
resistance to Papal exactions and its claim of English liberty. The 
classes in the towns on whom the influence of the Friars told most 
directly are steady supporters of freedom throughout the Barons' war. 
Adam Marsh was the close friend and confidant both of Grosteste and 
Earl Simon of Montfort. 

Section VII.— The Barons' War, 1258—1265. 

[Authorities. — At the very outset of this important period we lose the price- 
less aid of Matthew Paris. He is the last of the great chroniclers ; the Chroni- 
cles of his successor at S. Alban's, Rishanger (published by the Master of the 
Rolls), are scant and lifeless jottings, somewhat enlarged for this period by his 
fragment on the Barons' War (published by Camden Society). Something may 
be gleaned from the annals of Burton, Melrose, Dunstaple, Waverley, Osney, 
and Lanercost, the Royal Letters, the (royalist) Chronicle of Wykes, and (for 
London) the '* Liber de Antiquis Legibus." Mr. Blaauw has given a useful 
summary of the period in his *^ Barons' War."] 



When a thunderstorm once forced the King, as he was rowing on 
the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, 

L2 



I4S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal 
barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there 
was nothing to fear. Henry's petulant wit broke out in his reply. " I 
fear thunder and lightning not a little, Lord Simon," said the King, 
" but I iQ2ir you more than all the thunder and lightning in the world." 
The man whom Henry dreaded as the future champion of English 
freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort 
whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against 
the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul. As second son of this 
crusader, Simon became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, 
which had passed by marriage to his family, and a secret match with 
Eleanor, the King's sister and widow of the Earl Mareschal, raised him 
to kindred with the throne. The baronage, indignant at this sudden 
alliance with a stranger, rose in a revolt which failed only through the 
desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall ; while the censures 
of the Church on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chastity, which she had 
made at her first husband's death, were hardly averted by a journey 
to Rome and a year's crusade in Palestine. Simon returned to find 
the changeable King alienated from him and to be driven by a burst 
of royal passion from the realm, but he was soon restored to favour 
and appointed Governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule 
earned the hatred of the disorderly baronage, and the heavy taxation 
which his enforcement of order made necessary estranged from him 
the burgesses of Bourdeaux. The complaints of the Gascons brought 
about an open breach with the King. To Earl Simon's offer of the 
surrender of his post if the money he had spent in the royal service 
were, as Henrv had promised, repaid him, the King hotly retorted that 
he was bound by no promise to a false traitor. The Earl at once gave 
Henry the lie, — " Were he not King he should pay dearly for the insult," 
he said, — and returned to Gascony, to be soon superseded, and forced to 
seek shelter in France. The greatness of his reputation was shown 
in the offer which was made to him in his exile of the regency of 
France during the absence of St. Lewis at the Crusade. On his refusal 
he was suffered to return to England and re-enter the royal service. 
His character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the 
strict and severe piety of his father ; he was assiduous in his attend- 
ance on religious services, whether by night or day ; he was the 
friend of Grosteste and the patron of the Friars. In his correspond- 
ence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon 
troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and 
singularly temperate ; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, 
drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk ; but his 
natural temper was quick and fiery, his sense of honour keen, his 
speech rapid and trenchant. " You shall go or die," we find him reply- 
ing to William of Valence, when he refused to obey the orders of the 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER. 



149 



barons and quit the realm. But the one characteristic which over- 
mastered all was what men at that time called his " constancy," the 
firm immoveable resolve which trampled even death under foot in its 
loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward the First chose as his 
device, " Keep troth," was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We 
see in the correspondence of Friar Adam with what a clear discern- 
ment of its difficulties both at home and abroad he "thought it 
unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit" as the 
reduction of Gascony to peace and order ; but once undertaken, he 
Dersevered in spite of the opposition of the baronage, the short-sight- 
edness of the merchant class, the failure of all support or funds from 
Eno-land, and at last the King's desertion of his cause, till the work 
was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his 
patriotism. The letters of Marsh and Grosteste show how early he 
had learnt to sympathise with the bishop in his struggle for the reform 
of the Church and his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the 
contest he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He 
sends to Marsh a tract of Grosteste's on " the rule of a kingdom and 
of a tyranny," sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the 
advice of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. 
" Better is a patient man," writes the honest Friar, " than a strong 
man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city." 
" What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and 
not guard the peace of your own household ?" It was to secure " the 
peace of his fellow-citizens " that the Earl silently trained himself in 
the ten years that followed his return to England, and the fruit of his 
discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered 
and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people 
gathered itself round the stern, grave soldier who " stood like a pillar," 
unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had 
sworn. 

While Simon stood silently by, things went from bad to worse. The 
Pope still weighed heavily on the Church, and even excommunicated 
the Archbishop of York for resistance to his exactions. The barons 
were mutinous and defiant. " I will send reapers, and reap your fields 
, for you," Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk, when he 
" refused him aid. "And I will send you back the heads of your 
reapers," retorted the Earl. Hampered by the provisions of the 
Charter against arbitrary taxation, and by the refusal of the baronage 
to grant supplies while grievances were unredressed, the Crown was 
penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry's acceptance of a 
papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in favour of his second son Edmund. 
Shame had fallen on the Enghsh arms, and Edward had been disas- 
trously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. The tide of 
discontent, which was heightened by a grievous famine, burst its 



ICO 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



bounds when the King seized and sold corn which his brother, Richard 
of Cornwall, had sent from Germany to relieve the general distress ; 
and the barons repaired in arms to a Great Council summoned at 
Oxford. The past half-century had shown both the strength and - 
weakness of the Charter : its strength as a rallying-point for the baron^ ■ \ 
age, and a definite assertion of rights which the King could be made to ■ 
acknowledge ; its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement 
of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe 
the Charter, and his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscru- 
pulously broken. The barons had secured the freedom of the realm ; 
the secret of their long patience during the reign of Henry lay in the 
difficulty of securing its administration. It was this difficulty which 
Earl Simon was prepared to solve. With the Earl of Gloucester he 
now appeared at the head of the baronage, and demanded the appoint- 
ment of a committee to draw up terms for the representation of the 
state. Although half the committee consisted of royal ministers and 
favourites, it was impossible to resist the tide of popular feeling, and 
the new royal council named by it consisted wholly of adherents of 
the barons. In the Provisions of Oxford the Justiciary, Chancellor, 
and the guardians of the King^s castles swore to act only with the 
advice and assent of this Royal Council. The two first great officers, 
with the Treasurer, were to give account of their proceedings to it at 
the end of the year. Annual sheriffs were to be appointed from among 
the chief tenants of the county, and no fees were to be exacted for the 
administration of justice in their court. Three parliaments were to 
assemble every year, whether summoned by the King or no. The 
" commonalty " was to " elect twelve honest men who shall come to the 
parliaments and other times when occasion shall be, when the King or 
his council shall send for them, to treat of the wants of the King and 
of his kingdom. And the commonalty shall hold as established that 
which these twelve shall do.'' A royal proclamation in the English 
tongue, the first in that tongue which has reached us, ordered the 
observance of these Provisions. Resistance came only from the foreign 
favourites, and an armed demonstration drove them in flight over sea. 
Gradually the Council drew to itself the whole royal power, and the 
policy of the administration was seen in its prohibitions against any 
further payments, secular or ecclesiastical, to Rome, in the negotiations 
conducted by Earl Simon with France, which finally ended in the 
absolute renunciation of Henry's title to his lost provinces, and in the 
peace which put an end to the incursions of the Welsh. Within, how- 
ever, the measures of the barons were feeble and selfish. The further 
Provisions, published by them under popular pressure in the following 
year, showed that the majority of them aimed simply at the establish- 
ment of a governing aristocracy. All nobles and prelates were ex- 
empted from attendance at the sheriff's court, and inquiry was ordered 



III.] 



THE GREAT CHARTER, 



to be made by what right and warranty men whose fathers were serfs 
passed themselves off for freemen. It was in vain that Earl Simon 
returned from his negotiations in France to press for more earnest 
measures of reform, or that Edward, ever watchful to seize the moment 
of dissension among the barons, openly supported him ; Gloucester with 
the feudal party was only driven into close alliance with the King, and 
Henry, procuring a bill of absolution from the Pope, seized the Tov/er, 
and by pubhc proclamation ordered the counties to pay no obedience 
to the officers nominated by the barons. 

Deserted as he was, the Earl of Leicester showed no sign of 
submission. Driven for the moment into exile, he returned to find the 
barons again irritated by Henry's measures of reaction, while the death 
of the Earl of Gloucester removed the greatest obstacle to effective 
reform. At the Parliament of London a civil war seemed imminent, 
but against the will of Earl Simon a compromise was agreed on, and 
the question of the Provisions was referred to the arbitration of King 
Lewis of France. Mutual distrust, however, prevented any real accom- 
modation. The march of Edward with a royal army against Llewelyn 
of Wales was viewed by the barons as a prelude to hostilities against 
themselves ; and Earl Simon at once swept the Marches and besieged 
Dover. His power was strengthened by the attitude of the towns. 
The new democratic spirit which we have witnessed in the Friars was 
now stirring the purely industrial classes to assert a share in the 
municipal administration, which had hitherto been confined to the 
wealthier members of the merchant guild, and at London and else- 
where a revolution which will be described at greater length hereafter 
had thrown the government of the city into the hands of the lower 
citizens. The " communes," as the new city governments were called, 
showed an enthusiastic devotion to Earl Simon and his cause. The 
Queen was stopped in her attempt to escape from the Tower by an 
angry mob, who drove her back with stones and foul words. When 

i Henry attempted to surprise Leicester in his quarters in Southwark, 
the Londoners burst the gates which had been locked by the richer 
burghers against him, and rescued him by a welcome into the city. 

\ In spite of the taunts of the royalists, who accused him of seeking 
allies against the nobility in the common people, the popular enthu- 
siasm gave a strength to Earl Simon which enabled him to withstand 
the severest blow which had yet been dealt to his cause. In the Mise 
of Amiens, Lewis of France, who had accepted the task of arbitrating 
between the contending parties, gave his verdict wholly in favour of 
the King. The Provisions of Oxford v/ere annulled, the appointment 
and removal of the great officers of state was vested wholly in the 
Crown, the aliens might be recalled at the royal will, the castles were 
to be surrendered into Plenry's hands. The blow was a hard one, and 
the decision of Lewis was backed by the excommunications of Rome. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Luckily, the French award had reserved the rights of EngHshmen to tke 
Hberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of Oxford, and it was 
easy for Earl Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave to the 
Crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions themselves. 
London was the first to reject the decision ; its citizens mustered at 
the call of the town-bell at Saint Paul's, seized the royal officials, and 
plundered the royal parks. But the royal army had already mustered 
in great force at the King's summons, and Leicester found himself 
deserted by baron after baron. Every day brought news of ill. A detach- 
ment from Scotland joined Henry's forces, the younger De Montfort was 
taken prisoner in a sally, Northampton was captured, the King raised 
the siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon's only saved 
London itself from a surprise by Edward. Betrayed as he was, the 
Earl remained firm to his oath. He would fight to the end, he said, 
even were he and his sons left to fight alone. With an army reinforced 
by 15,000 Londoners, he marched to the relief of the Cinque Ports, 
which were now threatened by the King. Even on the march he was 
forsaken by many of the nobles who followed him. Halting at Flexing 
in Sussex, a few miles from Lewes, where the royal army was 
encamped. Earl Simon with the young Earl of Gloucester offered 
the King compensation for all damage if he would observe the Pro- 
visions. Henry's answer was one of defiance, and though numbers 
were against him the Earl resolved on battle. His skill as a soldier 
reversed the advantages of the ground ; marching at dawn, he seized 
the heights above the town, and forced the royal army to an attack. 
His men, with white crosses on back and breast, knelt in prayer while 
the royal forces advanced. Edward was the first to open the fight ; his 
furious charge broke the Londoners on Leicester's left, and in the 
bitterness of his hatred he pursued them for four miles, slaughtering 
three thousand men. He returned to find the battle lost. Crowded 
in the narrow space with a river in their rear, the royalist centre and 
left were crushed by Earl Simon ; the Earl of Cornwall, now King of 
the Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, " makede 
him a castel of a mulne post " (" he weened that the mill-sails were 
mangonels " goes on the sarcastic verse), was made prisoner, and Henry 
himself captured. Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in 
his father's surrender. 

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. 
" Now England breathes in the hope of liberty," sang a poet of the 
time ; " the English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted 
up their head and their foes are vanquished." The song announces 
with almost legal precision the theory of the patriots. "He who 
would be in truth a king, he is a ^ free king ' indeed if he rightly rule 
himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government 
of his kingdom, but nothing for its destruction. It is one thing to rule 



|i 



III.] 



TILE GREAT CHARTER. 



153 



according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting 
the law." " Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be 
known what the generahty, to whom their own laws are best known, 
think on the matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those 
laws best, they who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with 
them ; and since it is their own affairs which are at stake, they will 
take more care, and will act with an eye to their own peace." " It 
concerns the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be 
chosen for the weal of the realm." The constitutional restrictions on 
the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and 
decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection of the 
administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated before. 
That these were the principles of the man in whose hands victory had 
placed the realm is plain from the steps he immediately took. By the 
scheme devised in a parhament which immediately followed the battle 
of Lewes, the supreme power was to reside in the King, assisted by a 
council nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester and the 
patriotic Bishop of Chichester. In December a new parliament was 
summoned to Westminster, but the weakness of the patriotic party 
among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls 
and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty 
ecclesiastics. It was probably the sense of his weakness that 
forced Earl Simon to fling himself on the towns, and to summon 
two citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates from 
the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any matter 
respecting their interests was in question ; but it was the writ issued 
by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit 
beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the 
parliament of the realm. The importance of the step is best realized 
when we remember the new democratic spirit which through the 
victory of the ^* commune " over the wealthier burgher class was now 
triumphant in the towns. But it is only this great event which enables 
us to understand the large and prescient nature of Earl Simon's 
designs. Hardly a few months had passed since the victory of Lewes, 
and already, when the burghers took their seats at Westminster, his 
government was tottering to its fall. Dangers from without the Earl 
had met with complete success ; a general muster of the national 
forces on Barham Down had put an end to the projects of invasion 
entertained by the mercenaries whom the Queen had collected in 
Flanders ; the threats of France had died away into negotiations ; the 
Papal Legate had been forbidden to cross the Channel, and his bulls of 
excommunication had been flung into the sea. But the difflculties at 
home grew more formidable every day. The restraint put upon Henry 
and Edv/ard jarred against the national feeling of loyalty, and estranged 
the great masses who always side with the weak. Small as the 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH FEOFLE. 



[Chap.: 



patriotic party among the barons had always been, it grew smaller as 
dissensions broke out over the spoils of victory. The EarPs justice and 
resolve to secure the public peace told heavily against him. John 
Giffard left him because he refused to allow him to exact ransom from 
a prisoner contrary to the agreement made after Lewes. The Earl of 
Gloucester, though enriched with the estates of the foreigners, resented 
Leicester's prohibition of a tournament, his naming the wardens of the 
royal castles by his own authority, and his holding Edward's fortresses 
on the Welsh marches by his own garrisons. Gloucester's later con- 
duct proves the wisdom of Leicester's precautions. He was already 
in correspondence with the royal party, and on the escape of Edward 
from confinement he joined him with the whole of his forces. The 
moment was a luckless one for Earl Simon, who had advanced along 
bad roads into South Wales to attack the fortresses of his rebel col- 
league. Marching rapidly along the Severn, Edward took Gloucester, 
destroyed the ships by which Leicester hoped to escape to Bristol, and 
cut him off altogether from England ; then turning rapidly to the east, 
he surprised the younger Simon de Montfort, who was advancing to 
his father's relief, at Kenilworth, and cut his whole force to pieces. 
From the field of battle he again turned to meet Earl Simon himself, 
who had thrown his troops in boats across the Severn, and was hurry- 
ing to the junction with his son. Exhausted by a night march on 
Evesham, the Earl learnt the approach of the royal forces, and pushing 
his army to the front, rode to a hill to reconnoitre. His eye at once 
recognized in the orderly advance of his enemies the proof of his own 
experienced training. "By the arm of St. James," he cried, "they 
come on in wise fashion, but it was from me that they learnt it." A 
glance satisfied him of the hopelessness of the struggle. " Let us 
commend our souls to God," he said, to the little group around him, 
"for our bodies are the foe's." It was impossible, indeed, for a handful 
of horsemen with a host of half-armed Welshmen to resist the dis- 
ciplined knighthood of the royal army. The Earl^ therefore, bade Hugh 
Despencer and the rest of his comrades fly from the field. " If he 
died," was the noble answer, " they had no will to live." In two hours 
the butchery was over. The Welsh fled at the first onset like sheep, 
and were cut ruthlessly down in the cornfields and gardens where they , 
sought refuge. The group around Simon fought desperately, falling, 
one by one till the Earl was left alone. A lance-thrust brought his 
horse to the ground, but Simon still rejected the summons to yield, 
till a blow from behind felled him, mortally wounded, to the ground, 
and with a last cry of " It is God's grace " the soul of the great 
patriot passed away. 



lV.1 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



'^55 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE THREE EDWARDS, 
1265—1360. 



Section I»— The Conquest of "Wales, 1265—1234. 

[Authorities. — For the general state of Wales, see the " Itinerarium Cam- 
brise'' of Giraldus Cambrensis : for its general histor)^, the " Brut-y-Tywy- 
sogion," and ** Annales Cambriae," published by the Master of the Rolls ; the 
Chronicle of Caradoc of Lancarvan, as given in the translation by Powel ; 
and Warrington's **History of Wales." Stephen's *^ Literature of the Cymry" 
affords a general view of Welch poetry ; the * *Mabinogion" have been published 
by Lady Charlotte Guest. In his essays on **The Study of Celtic Literature," 
Mr. Matthew Arnold has admirably illustrated the characteristics of the 
Welch poetry. For English affairs we may add to the authorities used in the 
last chapter, the jejune Chronicles of Trivet and the later History of 
Hemingford.] 

While literature and science after a brief outburst were crushed in 
England by the turmoil of the Barons' War, a poetic revival had 
brought into sharp contrast the social and intellectual condition of 
Wales. 

To all outer seeming Wales had in the thirteenth century become 
utterly barbarous. Stripped of every vestige of the older Roman 
civilization by ages of bitter warfare, of civil strife, of estrangement 
from the general culture of Christendom, the unconquered Britons had 
sunk into a mass of savage herdsmen, clad in the skins and fed by 
the milk of the cattle they tended, faithless, greedy, and revengeful, 
retaining no higher political organization than that of the clan, 
broken by ruthless feuds, united only in battle or in raid against the 
stranger. But in the heart of the wild people there still lingered a 
spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years before, 
through Aneurin and Lly^varch Hen, to its struggle with the Saxon. 
At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was 
suddenly broken by a crowd of singers. The new poetry of the 
twelfth century burst forth, not from one bard or another, but from 
the nation at large. " In every house," says a shrewd English 
observer of the time, "strangers who arrived in the morning were 
entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of 



The 
Welch 
Iiitera^ 

tiire. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



Sec. I. 

The Con- 
quest OF 
Wales. 
1265- 
I284-. 



the harp." The new enthusiasm of the race found an admirable 
means of utterance in its tongue, as real a development of the old 
Celtic language heard by C^sar as the Romance tongues are develop- 
ments of Ccesar's Latin, but which at a far earlier date than any other 
language of modern Europe had attained to definite structure and 
to settled literary form. No other mediaeval literature shows at its 
outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the 
Welch, but within these settled forms the Celtic fancy plays with a 
startling freedom. In one of the later poems Gwion the Little trans- 
forms himself into a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat ; but he is 
only the symbol of the strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy 
embodies itself in the tales or Mabinogi which reached their highest 
perfection in the legends of Arthur. Its gay extravagance flings 
defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible 
and unreal. When Arthur sails into the unknown world, it is in a 
ship of glass. The "descent into hell," as a Celtic poet paints it, 
shakes off the mediaeval horror with the mediaeval reverence, and the 
knight who achieves the quest spends his years of infernal durance in 
hunting and minstrelsy, and in converse with fair women. The world 
of the Mabinogi is a W6rld of pure phantasy, a new earth of marvels 
and enchantments, of dark forests whose silence is broken by the 
hermit's bell, and sunny glades where the light plays on the hero's 
armour. Each figure as it moves across the poef s canvas is bright 
with glancing colour. " The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame- 
coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold in which 
were precious emeralds and rubies. Her head was of brighter gold 
than the flower of the broom, her skin was whiter than the foam of 
the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms 
of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The 
eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the falcon, was not brighter than 
I hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, 
i her cheek was redder than the reddest roses." Everywhere there is an 
\ Oriental profusion of gorgeous imagery, but the gorgeousness is seldom 
; oppressive. The sensibility of the Celtic temper, so quick to perceive 
I beauty, so eager in its thirst for life, its emotions, its adventures, its 
I sorrows, its joys, is tempered by a passionate melancholy that ex- 
j presses its revolt against the impossible, by an instinct of what is 
noble, by a sentiment that discovers the weird charm of nature. 
Some graceful play of pure fancy, some tender note of feeling, some 
magical touch of beauty, relieves its worst extravagance. Kalweh's 
greyhounds, as they bound from side to side of their master's steed, 
" sport round him like two sea-swallows." His spear is " swifter than 
the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth 
when the dew of June is at the heaviest." A subtle, observant love 
of nature and natural beauty takes fresh colour from the passionate 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



157 



human sentiment with which it is imbued, sentiment which breaks out 
in Gwalchmai's cry of nature-love, " I love the birds and their sweet 
voices m the lulling songs of the wood," in his watches at night besides 
the fords " among the untrodden grass " to hear the nightingale and 
watch the play of the sea-mew. Even patriotism takes the same 
picturesque form ; the poet hates the flat and sluggish land of the 
Saxon ; as he loves his own, he tells of " its sea-coast and its moun- 
tains, its towns on the forest border, its fair landscape, its dales, 
its waters, and its valleys, its white sea-mews, its beauteous women." 
But the song passes swiftly and subtly into a world of romantic senti- 
ment : " I love its fields clothed with tender trefoil, I love the marches 
of Merioneth where my head was pillowed on a snow-white arm." 

: In the Celtic love of woman there is little of the Teutonic depth 
and earnestness, but in its stead a childlike spirit of delicate enjoy- 

, ment, a faint distant flush of passion like the rose-light of dawn on 
a snow}^ mountain peak, a playful delight in beauty. " White is my 
love as the apple blossom, as the ocean's spray ; her face shines like 

' the pearly dew on Eryri ; the glow of her cheeks is like the light of 
sunset." But the buoyant and elastic temper of the French trouveur 
is spiritualized in the Welch singers by a more refined poetic feeling. 
" Whoso beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils 
sprang up v/herever she trod." The touch of pure fancy removes its 
object out of the sphere of passion into one of delight and reverence. 
It is strange, as we have said, to pass from the world of actual Welch 

. histoiy into such a world as this. But side by side with this wayward, 

1 fanciful stream of poesy and romance ran a torrent of intenser song. 
The old spirit of the earlier bards, their joy in battle, their love for 
freedom, their hatred of the Saxon, broke out in ode after ode, turgid, 
extravagant, monotonous, often prosaic, but fused into poetry by the 
intense fire of patriotism which glowed within it. The rise of the new 
poetic feeling indeed marked the appearance of a new energy in the 
long struggle with the English conqueror. 

Of the three Welch states into which all that remained unconquered 
of Britain had been broken by the victories of Deorham and Chester, 
two had already ceased to exist. The country between the Clyde 
and the Dee, which soon became parted into the kingdoms of Cumbria 

•and Strathclyde, had been gradually absorbed by the conquest of 

■ Northumbria. West Wales, between the British Channel and the 
estuary of the Severn, had yielded at last to the sword of ^thelstan. 
But a fiercer resistance prolonged the independence of the great 
central portion which alone in modern language preserves the name 
of Wales. In itself the largest and most powerful of the British 
kingdoms, it was aided in its struggle against Mercia by the weakness 
of its assailant, the youngest and least powerful of the English states, 
as well as by the internal warfare which distracted the energies of the 



ii'S 



HISTORY 01 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



invaders. But Mercia had no sooner risen to supremacy among the 
Enghsh kingdoms, than it took the conquest vigorously in hand. 
Offa tore from Wales the border land between the Severn and the 
Wye ; the raids of his successors carried fire and sword into the 
heart of the country ; and an acknowledgment of the Mercian over-lord- 
ship was wrested from the Welch princes. On the fall of Mercia this 
passed to the West-Saxon kings. The Laws of Howel Dhu own the 
payment of a yearly tribute by " the prince of Aberfrau " to " the 
king of London," and three Welch chieftains were among the subject 
feudatories who rowed Eadgar on the Dee. The weakness of 
England during her long struggle with the Danes revived the hopes of 
British independence, and in the midst of the Confessor's reign the 
Welch seized on a quarrel between the houses of Leofric and Godwine 
to cross the border and carry their attacks into England itsel£ The 
victories of Harold, however, re-asserted the English supremacy ; his 
light-armed troops disembarking on the coast penetrated to the heart 
of the mountains, and the successors of the Welch prince Gruffydd, 
whose head was the trophy of the campaign, swore to observe the old 
fealty and render the old tribute to the English Crown. 

A far more desperate struggle began when the wave of Norman 
conquest broke on the Welch frontier. A chain of great earldoms, 
settled by William along the border land, at once bridled the old 
marauding forays. From his county palatine of Chester, Hugh the 
Wolf harried Flintshire into a desert ; Robert of Belesme, in his 
earldom of Shrewsbury, " slew the Welch," says a chronicler, " like 
sheep, conquered them, enslaved them, and flayed them with nails of 
iron." Backed by these greater baronies a horde of lesser adventurers 
obtained the royal " licence to make conquest on the Welch.'^ 
Monmouth and Abergavenny were seized and guarded by Norman 
castellans ; Bernard of Neufmarche won the lordship of Brecknock f; 
Roger of Montgomery raised the town and fortress in Powysland 
which still preserves his name. 

A great rising of the whole people at last recovered some of this 
Norman spoil. The new castle of Montgomery was burnt, Brecknock 
and Cardigan were cleared of the invaders, and the Welch poured^' ' 
ravaging over the English border. Twice the Red King carried his 
arms fruitlessly among the mountains, against enemies who took refuge 
in their fastnesses till famine and hardship had driven his broken host 
into retreat. The wiser policy of Henry the First fell back on his 
father's system of gradual conquest, and a new tide of invasion flowed 
along the coast, where the land was level and open and accessible 
from the sea. Robert Fitz-Hamo, the lord of Hereford, had already 
been summoned to his aid by a Welch chieftain ; and by the defeat 
of Rhys ap Tewdor, the last prince under whom Southern Wales 
was united, had produced an anarchy which enabled him to land 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



159 



safely on the coast, to sweep the Welch from Glamorgan, and divide 
it between his soldiery. A force of Flammands and EngHshmen 
followed Richard Strongbow as he landed near Milford Haven, and 
pushing back the inhabitants settled a " Little England " in the present 
Pembrokeshire. Traces of the Flemish speech still linger perhaps in 
the peninsula of Gower, where a colony of mercenaries from Flanders 
settled themselves at a somewhat later time, while a few daring 
adventurers followed the Lord of Keymes into Cardiganshire, where 
land might be had for the asking by any who would "wage war upon 
the Welch." 

It was at this moment, when the utter subjugation of the British 
race seemed close at hand, that the new poetic fire rolled back the tide 
of invasion, and changed these fitful outbreaks of Welch resistance into 
a resolute effort to regain national independence. Every fight, every 
'hero, had suddenly its verse. The names of the older bards were 
revived in bold forgeries to animate the national resistance and to 
prophesy victory. It was in North Wales that the new spirit of 
patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of song. 
Again and again Henry the Second was driven to retreat from the 
impregnable fastnesses where the " Lords of Snowdon," the princes 
of the house of Gruffydd ab Conan, claimed supremacy over Wales. 
Once a cry arose that the King was slain, Henry of Essex fiung 
down the royal standard, and the King^s desperate efforts could hardly 
save his army from utter rout. In a later campaign the invaders were 
met by storms of rain, and forced to abandon their baggage in a head- 
long flight to Chester. The greatest of the Welch odes, that known to 
English readers in Gray^s translation as " The Triumph of Owen," is 
Gwalchmai's song of victory over the repulse of an English fleet from 
Abermenai. The long reigns of the two Llewelyns, the sons of 
Jorwerth and of Gruffydd, which all but cover the last century of Welch 
independence, seemed destined to realize the hopes of their country- 
men. The homage which the first succeeded in extorting from the 
whole of the Welch chieftains placed him openly at the head of his 
race, and gave a new character to his struggle with the English King. 
In consoHdating his authority within his own domains, and in the 
assertion of his lordship over the princes of the south, Llewelyn ap 
Jorwerth aimed steadily at securing the means of striking off the yoke 
of the Saxon. It was in vain that John strove to buy his friendship 
by the hand of his daughter Johanna. Fresh raids on the Marches 
forced the King to enter Wales ; but though his army reached 
Snowdon, it fell back like its predecessors, starved and broken before 
an enemy it could never reach. A second attack had better success. 
The chieftains of South Wales were drawn from their new allegiance 
to join the English forces, and Llewelyn, prisoned in his fastnesses, was 
at last driven to submit. But the ink of the treaty was hardly dry 



r6o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 

The Con- 
quest OF 

Wales. 

1265- 
1284. 



Llewel3rn 
ap Jor- 

werth 
and the 

Bards. 



before Wales was again on fire ; the common fear of the Enghsh once 
more united its chieftains, and the war between John and his barons 
removed all dread of a new invasion. Absolved from his allegiance 
to an excommunicated King, and allied with the barons under Fitz- 
Walter — too glad to enlist in their cause a prince who could hold in 
check the nobles of the border country, where the royalist cause was 
strongest — Llewelyn seized his opportunity to reduce Shrewsbury, to 
annex Poaa^s, where the English influence had always been powerful, 
to clear the royal garrisons from Caermarthen and Cardiganshire 
and to force even the Flemings of Pembroke to do him homage. 

The hopes of Wales rose higher and higher with each triumph of 
the Lord of Snowdon. The court of Llewelyn was crowded with 
bardic singers. "He pours," sings one of them, "his gold into the 
lap of the bard as the ripe fruit falls from the trees." But gold was 
hardly needed to wake their enthusiasm. Poet after poet sang of " the 
Devastator of England," the " Eagle of men that lovco not to He nor 
sleep," " towering above the rest of men with his long red lance," 
his " red helmet of battle crested with a fierce wolf," " The sound 
of his coming is like the roar of the wave as it rushes to the shore, 
that can neither be stayed nor appeased." Lesser bards strung 
together his victories in rough jingle of rhyme, and hounded him on 
to the slaughter. " Be of good courage in the slaughter," sings Elidir, 
"clii^gto thy work, destroy England, and plunder its multitudes." 
A fierce thirst for blood runs through the abrupt, passionate verses 
of the court singers. " Swansea, that tranquil town, was broken in 
heaps," bursts out a triumphant poet ; " St. Clears, with its bright 
white lands, it is not Saxons who hold it now ! " " In Swansea, the 
key of Lloegria, we made widows of all the wives." " The dread Eagle 
is wont to lay corpses in rows, and to feast with the leader of wolves 
and with hovering ravens glutted with flesh, butchers with keen scent 
of carcases." " Better," closes the song, " is the grave than the life of 
man who sighs when the horns call him forth to the squares of battle." 
But even in bardic verse Llewelyn rises high out of the mere mob of 
chieftains who live by rapine, and boast as the Hirlas-horn passes from 
hand to hand through the hall that " they take and give no quarter." 
"Tender-hearted, wise, witty, ingenious," he was "the great Caesar" who 
was to gather beneath his sway the broken fragments of the Celtic race. 
Mysterious prophecies floated from lip to lip, till the name of Merlin 
was heard along the Seine and the Rhine. Medrawd and Arthur . j 
would appear once more on earth to fight over again the fatal batt]ei| 
of Camlan. The last conqueror of the Celtic race, Cadwallon, still 
lived to combat for his people. The supposed verses of Taliesin ex- 
pressed the undying hope of a restoration of the Cymry. " In their 
hands shall be all the land from Brittany to Man : . , . a rumour 
shall arise that the Germans are moving out of Britain back again to j 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



i6i 



their fatherland." Gathered up in the strange work of Geoffry of 
Monmouth, these predictions made a deep impression, not on Wales 
only, but on its conquerors. It was to meet indeed the dreams of a 
yet living Arthur that the grave of the legendary hero-king at 
Glastonbury was found and visited by Henry the Second. But 
neither trick nor conquest could shake the firm faith of the Celt in 
the ultimate victory of his race. "Think you," said Henry to a 
Welch chieftain who had joined his host, "that your people of rebels 
can withstand my army ? " " My people," replied the chieftain, 
" may be weakened by your might, and even in great part destroyed, 
but unless the wrath of God be on the side of its foe it will not perish 
utterly. Nor deem I that other race or other tongue will answer for 
this corner of the world before the Judge of all at the last day save 
this people and tongue of Wales." So ran the popular rhythm, 
" Their Lord they will praise, their speech they shall keep, their land 
they shall lose — except wild Wales." Faith and prophecy seemed 
justified by the growing strength of the British people. The weak- 
ness and dissensions which characterized the reign of Henry the Third 
enabled Llewelyn ap Jorwerth to preserve a practical independence 
till the close of his life, when a fresh acknowledgment of the English 
supremacy was wrested from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the 
triumphs of his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Grufiyd, 
whose ravages swept the border to the very gates of Chester, while 
his fleet intercepted and routed the reinforcements which the English 
were drawing from Ireland. His conquest of Glamorgan roused the 
Welch chieftains to swear eternal enmity against the English race, 
and throughout the Barons' war Llewelyn remained master of Wales. 
Even at its close the threat of an attack from the now united 
kingdom only forced him to submission on a practical acknowledg- 
ment of his sovereignty. The chieftain whom the English kings 
had till then scrupulously designated as " Lord of Snowdon," was 
now allowed the title of " Prince of Wales,'' and his right to receive 
homage from the other nobles of his principality was formally allowed. 

Near, however, as Llewelyn seemed to the final realization of his 
aims, he was still a vassal of the English crown, and the accession of 
a new sovereign to the throne was at once followed by the demand 
of his homage. The youth of Edward the First had given little 
promise of the high qualities which distinguished him as an English 
ruler. In his earlier manhood he had won general ill-will by the 
turbulence and disorder of his knightly train ; his intrigues in the 
earlier part of the Barons' war had aroused the suspicions of the 
King ; his faithlessness in the later time had brought about the fatal 
conflict between the Crown and Earl Simon which ended in the 
Earl's terrible overthrow. London remembered bitterly his ruthless 
butchery of her citizens at Lewes, and the reckless pillage at the close , 

M 



Sec. I. 



l62 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the war with which he avenged an insult offered to his mother 
But with the victory of Evesham his character seemed to mould itself 
into nobler form. It was from Earl Simon, as the Earl owned with a 
proud bitterness ere his death, that Edward had learned the skill in 
warfare which distinguished him am.ong the princes of his tim^e. 
But he had learned from the Earl the far nobler lesson of a self- 
government which lifted him high above them as a ruler among men. 
Severing himself from the brutal triumph of the royalist party, he 
secured fair terms to the conquered, and after crushing the last traces 
of resistance, cleared the realm of the disorderly bands which the 
cessation of the war had let loose on the country by leading them to a 
crusade in Palestine. His father's death recalled him home to meet at 
once the difficulty of Wales. During two years Llewelyn rejected 
the King's repeated summons to him to perform his homage, till 
Edward's patience was exhausted, and the royal army marched into 
North Wales. The fabric of Welch greatness fell at a single blow ; 
the chieftains of the south and centre who had so lately sworn fealty 
to Llewelyn deserted him to join his English enemies ; a fleet from the 
Cinque Ports reduced Anglesea, and the chief of Snowdon, cooped 
up in his fastnesses, was forced to throw himself on the royal mercy. 
With characteristic generosity, his conqueror contented himself with 
adding to the English dominions the country as far as Conway, and 
providing that the title of Prince of Wales should cease at Llewelyn's 
death. A heavy fine which he had incurred was remitted, and Eleanor 
the daughter of Simon of Montfort, who had been arrested on her 
way to join him as his wife, was wedded to him at the English court. 
For four years all was quiet, but a sudden outbreak of his brother 
David, who had deserted him in the previous war, and whose desertion 
had been rewarded with an English earldom, roused Llewelyn to a 
renewal of the struggle. A prophecy of Merlin had announced that 
when English money became round the Prince of Wales should be 
crowned at London, and a new coinage of copper money, coupled 
with the prohibition to break the silver penny into halves and quarters, 
as had been usual, was supposed to have fulfilled the prediction. In 
the campaign which followed the Prince held out in Snowdon with the 
stubbornness of despair, and the rout of an English detachment which 
had thrown a bridge across the Menai Straits from Anglesea pro- 
longed the contest into the winter. Terrible, however, as were the 
sufferings of the English army, Edward's firmness remained unbroken, 
and rejecting all proposals of retreat he issued orders for the formation 
of a new army at Caermarthen to complete the circle of investment. 
The danger drew Llewelyn into Radnorshire, and the last Prince of 
Wales fell, unrecognized, in a petty skirmish on the banks of the Wye. 
With him expired the independence of his race. After six months of 
I flight his brother David was arrested and sentenced by the Parliament 



iv.i 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



163 



to a traitor^s death. The submission of the lesser chieftains was 
followed by the building of strong castles at Conway and Caernarvon 
and the settlement of Enghsh barons on the confiscated soil. A 
wiser instinct of government led Edward to estabhsh trade-guilds in 
the towns, to introduce the English jurisprudence, to divide the 
country into shires and hundreds on the English model, and to abolish 
by the " Statute of Wales " the more barbarous of the Welch customs. 
His pohcy of justice and conciliation (for the alleged " massacre of 
the bards" is a mere fable) accomplished its end, and with the 
exception of a single rising in Edward's reign the peace of Wales 
remained unbroken for a hundred years. 



Section II.— The English Parliament, 1283—1295. 

[Authorities. — The short treatise on the Constitution of Parliament called 
** Modus tenendi Parliamenti " may be taken as a fair account of its actual 
state and powers in the fourteenth century. It has been reprinted by Professor 
Stubbs, in the invaluable collection of Documents which serves as the base of 
the present section. Sir Francis Palgrave has illustrated the remedial side 
of our parliamentary institutions with much vigour and picturesqueness in his 
** History of the English Commonwealth," but his conclusions are often hasty and 
prejudiced. On all constitutional points from the reign of Edward the First 
we can now rely on the judgment and research of Mr. Hallam (" Middle Ages").] 



The conquest of Wales marked the adoption of a new attitude and 
pohcy on the part of the Crown. From the earliest moment of his 
reign Edward the First definitely abandoned all dreams of recovering 
the foreign dominions of his race, to concentrate himself on the con- 
solidation and good government of Britain itself. We can only fairly 
judge his annexation of Wales or his attempt to annex Scotland if we 
regard them as parts of the same scheme of national administration 
to which we owe his final establishment of our judicature, our 
legislation, our Parliament. The King^s Enghsh policy, like his 
English name, are the signs of a new epoch. The long period of 
national formation has come practically to an end. With the reign of 
Edward begins modem England, the England in which we live. It is not 
that any chasm separates our history before it from our history after 
it, as the chasm of the Revolution divides the history of France, for 
we have traced the rudiments of our constitution to the first moment 
of the English settlement in Britain. But it is with these as with our 
language. The tongue of ^Elfred is the very tongue we speak, but in 
spite of its actual identity with modem English it has to be learnt like 
the tongue of a stranger. On the other hand, the English of Chaucer 
is almost as intelligible as our own. In the first the historian and 

M 2 



r64 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



philologer can study the origin and development of our national 
speech, in the last a school-boy can enjoy the story of Troilus and 
Cresside, or listen to the gay chit-chat of the Canterbury Tales. In 
precisely the same way the laws of ^thelstan or Stephen are indis- 
pensable for the right understanding of later legislation, its origin and 
its development, while thepriticiples of our Parliamentary system must 
necessarily be studied in the Meetings of Wise Men before the 
Conquest or barons after it. But the Parliaments which Edward 
gathered at the close of his reign are not merely illustrative of the 
history of later Parliaments, they are absolutely identical with those 
which still sit at St. Stephen's ; and a statute of Edward, if unrepealed, 
can be pleaded in our courts as formally as a statute of Victoria. 
In a word, the long struggle of the constitution for actual existence 
has come to an end. The contests which follow are not contests which 
tell, like those which preceded them, on the actual fabric of our 
political institutions ; they are simply stages in the rough discipline 
by which England has learnt, and is still learning, how best to use 
and how wisely to develop the latent powers of its national life, how to 
adjust the balance of its social and political forces, and to adapt its con- 
stitutional forms to the varying conditions of the time. From the reign 
of Edward, in fact, we are face to face with modern England. Kings, 
Lords, Commons, the courts of justice, the forms of public adminis- 
tration, our local divisions and provincial jurisdictions, the relations 
of Church and State, in great measure the framework of society 
itself, have all taken the shape which they still essentially retain. 

Much of this great change is doubtless attributable to the general 
temper of the age, whose special task and object seemed to be thai 
of reducing to distinct form the great principles which had sprung into 
a new and vigorous life during the century that preceded it. As the 
thirteenth century had been an age of founders, creators, discoverers, 
so its successor was an age of lawyers \ the most illustrious men of 
the time were no longer such as Bacon, or Earl Simon, or Francis 
of Assisi, but men such as St. Lewis of France or Alfonso the Wise, 
organizers, administrators, framers of laws and institutions. It was 
to this class that Edward himself belonged. There is no trace of 
creative genius or originality in his character, but he possessed in a 
high degree the faculty of organization, and his passionate love of law 
broke out even in the legal chicanery to which he sometimes stooped. 
In the judicial reforms to which the earlier part of his reign was 
devoted we see, if not an " Enghsh Justinian,^' at any rate a clear- 
sighted man of business, developing, reforming, bringing into dis- 
tinct shape the institutions of his predecessors. His first step was 
to define the provinces of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, by 
restricting the Bishops' Courts, or Courts Christian, to the cognizance 
of purely spiritual causes, and of causes like those of perjury, marriage^ 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



165 



and testamentary dispositions, which were regarded as of a semi- 
spiritual nature. The most important court of civil jurisdiction, the 
Sheriffs' or County Court, remained unchanged, both in the extent 
of its jurisdiction, and the character of the Sheriff as a royal officer. 
But a change which told greatly on its powers sprang almost acci- 
dentally from the operation of a statute (that of Winchester) which | 
provided for the peace of the realm. To enforce the observance j 
of this act knights were appointed in every shire under the name of j 
Conservators of the Peace, a name v/hich, as the convenience of these I 
local magistrates was more sensibly felt and their powers more largely 
extended, was changed for that which they still retain, of "Justices 
of the Peace." The superior courts into which the King's Court had 
since the great Charter divided itself — those of the King's Bench, 
Exchequer, and Common Pleas — assumed their present form partly by 
each receiving a distinct staff of judges, partly by the extinction of 
the office of the Justiciar, who had till then given them a seeming 
unity by acting as president in all. Of far greater importance than these 
changes, which were in fact but the completion of reforms begun long 
before, Avas the establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side 
with that of the common law. In his reform of 11 78 Henry the 
Second had broken up the older King's Court, which had till then 
served as the final Court of Appeal, by the severance of the purely 
legal judges who had been gradually added to it from the general 
body of his councillors. The judges thus severed from the Council 
retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of " the King's Court," 
while all cases in which they failed to do justice were reserved for the 
special cognizance of the Council itself. To this new final jurisdiction 
of the King in Council, Edward gave a wide development ; his 
assembly of the ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the 
law officers of the Crown, reserved to itself in its judicial capacity 
the correction cif all breaches of the law which the lower courts had 
failed to repress, whether from weakness, partiaHty, or corruption, and 
especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage 
which defied the common authority of the judges. Though regarded 
with jealousy by Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Council seems to 
haveloeen steadily exercised through the two centuries which followed; 
in the reign of Henry the Seventh it took legal and statutory form in 
the new shape of the Court of Star Chamber, and its powers are still 
exercised in our own days by the Judicial Committee of the Privy 
Council. But at a far earlier date its jurisdiction as a Court of 
Appeal had given birth to that of the Chancellor. The separate 
powers of this great officer of State, who had originally acted only as 
President of the Council when discharging its judicial functions, seems 
to have been thoroughly established under Edward the First, and 
considerably extended during the' reigji of his successor. It is by { 



Sec. II. 



i66 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



remembering the origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand 
the nature of the powers it gradually acquired. All grievances of, 
the subject, especially those which sprang from the misconduct o; 
government officials or of powerful oppressors, fell within its cognizance, 
as they had fallen within that of the Royal Council, and to these wen 
added disputes respecting the wardship of infants, dower, rent-charges, 
or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction sprang from the defective nature 
and the technical and unbending rules of the common law. As the 
Council had given redress in cases where law became injustice, so the 
Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules of procedure 
adopted by the common law courts, on the petition of a party for 
whose grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. An 
analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford 
rehef in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this side of 
his jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time through the results 
of legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. 

In legislation, as in his judicial reforms, Edward did little more than 
renew and consolidate the principles which had been already brought 
into practical working by Henry the Second. His Statute of Win- 
chester followed the precedent of the "Assize of Arms^' in basing 
the preservation of public order on the revival and development of 
the local system of frank-pledge. Every man was bound to hold 
himself in readiness, duly armed, for the King's service, or the hue and 
cry which pursued the felon. Every district was made responsible for 
crimes committed within its bounds ; the gates of each town were 
required to be closed at nightfall, and all strangers to give an account 
of themselves to its magistrates. As a security for travellers against 
sudden attacks from robbers, all brushwood v/as to be destroyed for a 
space of two hundred feet on either' side the public highway, a pro 
vision which illustrates at once the social and physical condition ofj 
the country at the time. The same care for the trading classes was 
seen in the Statute of Merchants, which provided for the registration 
of the debts of traders, and for their recovery by distraint of the 
debtor's goods and the imprisonment of his person. The Statute of 
Mortmain, which prohibited the alienation of lands to the Church 
under pain of forfeiture, was based on the Constitutions of Clarendon, 
but it is difficult to see in it more than a jealousy of the rapid growth 
of ecclesiastical estates, which, grudged as it was by the baronage, was 
probably beneficial to the country at large, as military service was 
rendered by Church fees as rigidly as by lay, while the churchmen 
were the better landlords. The statute, however, was soon evaded by 
the ingenuity of lawyers, but it probably checked a process which it 
could not wholly arrest. We trace the same conservative tendency, 
the same blind desire to keep things as they were during an age of 
rapid transition, in the great land-law which bears the technical 



\ 

■ef 



t 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



167 



name of the Statute " Quia Emptores." It is one of those legislative 
efforts which mark the progress of a wide social revolution in the 
country at large. The number of the greater barons was in fact 
diminishing eveiy day, while the number of the country gentry and 
of the more substantial yeomanry was increasing with the increase 
of the national wealth. This increase showed itself in the growing 
desire to become proprietors of land. Tenants of the greater barons 
received under-tenants on condition of their rendering them similar 
services to those which they themselves rendered to their lords ; and the 
baronage, while duly receiving the services in compensation for which 
they had originally granted their land in fee, saw with jealousy the 
feudal profits of these new under-tenants, the profits of wardship or 
of reliefs and the like, in a word the whole increase in the value of 
the estate consequent on its subdivision and higher cultivation, 
passing into other hands than their own. To check this growth of a 
squirearchy, as we should now term it, the statute provided that in any 
case of alienation the sub-tenant should henceforth hold, not of the 
tenant, but directly of the superior lord ; but its result seems to have 
been to promote instead of hindering the subdivision of land. The 
tenant who was compelled before to retain in any case so much of the 
estate as enabled him to discharge his feudal services to the over-lord of 
whom he held it, was now enabled by a process analogous to the sale 
of " tenant-right/' to transfer both land and services to new holders. 

It is to the same social revolution rather than to any political 
prescience of Edward the First, that we owe our Parliament. Neither 
the Meeting of the Wise Men before the Conquest, nor the Great 
Council of the Barons after it, had been in any way representative 
bodies. The first, which theoretically included all free holders of 
land, had shrunk at an early time — as we have seen — into a gathering 
of the earls, the higher nobles, and the bishops, with the officers and 
thegns of the royal household. Little change was made in the 
composition of this assembly by the Conquest, for the Great Council 
of the Norman kings was held to include all tenants who held 
directly of the Crown, the bishops and greater abbots (whose character 
as independent spiritual members tended more and more to merge 
in their position as barons), and the great officers of the Court. But 
though its composition remained the same, the character of the 
assembly was essentially altered. From a free gathering of " Wise 
Men " it sank to a Royal Court of feudal vassals ; but though its 
functions seem to have become almost nominal, and its powers to 
have been restricted to the sanctioning, without debate or possibility 
of refusal, all grants demanded from it by the Crown, its " counsel and 
consent " remained necessary for the legal validity of every great fiscal 
or political measure, and thus protested effectually against the imperial 
theories advanced by the lawyers of Flenry the Third, theories which 



1 68 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



declared all legislative power to reside wholly in the sovereign. It 
was in fact under Henry the Second that these assemblies became 
more regular, and their functions more important. The great reforms 
which marked his reign were issued in the Great Council, and even 
financial matters were suffered to be debated there. But it was not 
till the grant of the Great Charter that its powers over taxation were 
formally recognized, and the principle established that no burthen 
beyond the customary feudal aids might be imposed " save by the 
Common Council of the Realm." The same great document first 
expressly regulated its form. In theory, as we have seen, the 
assembly consisted of all who held land directly of the Crown. But 
the same causes which restricted attendance at the Witenagemot 
to the greater nobles, told on the actual composition of the Council 
of Barons. While the attendance of the ordinary tenants in chief, 
the Knights or " Lesser Barons," was burthensome fram its expense to 
themselves, their numbers and their dependence on the higher nobles 
made it dangerous to the Crown. As early, therefore, as the time of 
Henry the First we find a distinction recognized between the " Greater 
Barons," of whom the Council was usually composed, and the " Lesser 
Barons " who formed the bulk of the tenants of the Crown ; but though 
the attendance of the latter had become rare, their right of attendance 
remained intact. While enacting that the prelates and greater barons 
should be summoned by special writs to each gathering of the Council, 
a remarkable provision of the Great Charter orders a general summons 
to be issued through the Sheriff to all direct tenants of the Crown. 
The provision was probably intended to rouse the lesser baronage to 
the exercise of rights which had practically passed into desuetude, 
but as the clause is omitted in later issues of the Charter we may doubt 
whether the principle it embodied ever received more than a very 
limited application. There are traces of the attendance of a few of 
the lesser knighthood, gentry perhaps of the neighbourhood where the 
Assembly was held, in some of its meetings under Henry the Third, 
but till a late period in the reign of his successor the Great Council 
practically remained a gathering of the greater barons, the prelates, 
and the of^cers of the Crown. The change which the Great Charter 
had failed to accomplish was now, however, brought about by the 
social circumstances of the time. One of the most remarkable of 
these was the steady decrease in the number of the greater nobles. The 
bulk of the earldoms had already lapsed to the Crown through the 
extinction of the families of their possessors ; of the greater baronies, 
many had practically ceased to exist by their division among female 
co-heiresses, many through the constant struggle of the poorer barons 
to rid themselves of their rank by a disclaimer, so as to escape the 
burthen of higher taxation and attendance in Parliament which it 
involved. How far this diminution had gone we may see from the fact 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



that hardly more than a hundred barons sat in the earlier Councils 
of Edward's reign. But while the number of those who actually 
possessed the privilege of assisting in Parliament was rapidly dimin- 
ishing, the numbers and wealth of the " lesser baronage," whose right 
of attendance had become a mere constitutional tradition, was as 
rapidly increasing. The long peace and prosperity of the realm, the 
extension of its commerce, and the increased export of wool, were 
swelUng the ranks and incomes of the country gentry as well as of 
the freeholders and substantial yeomanry. We have already noticed 
the growing passion for the possession of land which makes this reign 
so critical a moment in the history of the English squirearchy ; but the 
same tendency had to some extent existed in the preceding century, 
and it was a consciousness of the growing importance of this class of 
rural proprietors which induced the barons to make their fruitless 
attempt to induce them to take part in the dehberations of the Great 
Council. But while the barons desired their presence as an aid against 
the Crown, the Crown itself desired it as a means of rendering taxation- 
more efficient. So long as the Great Council remained a mere assembly 
of magnates it was necessary for the King's ministers to treat separately 
with the other orders of the state as to the amount and assessment of 
their contributions. The grant made in the Great Council was binding, 
only on the barons and prelates who made it ; but before the aids of the 
boroughs, the Church, or the shires could reach the royal treasury, a 
separate negotiation had to be conducted by the officers of the 
Exchequer with, the reeves of each town, the sheriff and shire-court of 
each county, and the archdeacons of each diocese. Bargains of this 
sort would be the more tedious and disappointing as the necessities of 
the Crown increased in the later years of Edward, and it became a 
matter of fiscal expediency to obtain the sanction of any proposed tax- 
ation through the presence of these classes in the Great Council itself. 
The effort, however, to revive the old personal attendance of the 
lesser baronage which had broken down half a century before, could 
hardly be renewed at a time when the increase of their numbers made 
it more impracticable than ever ; but a means of escape from this 
difficulty was fortunately suggested by the very nature of the court 
through which alone a summons could be addressed to the landed 
knighthood. Amidst the many judicial reforms of Henry or Edward 
the. Shire Court remained unchanged. The haunted mound or the 
immemorial oak round which the assembly gathered (for the court was 
often held in the open air) were the relics of a time before the free 
kingdom had sunk into a shire, and its Meetings of the Wise into a 
County Court. But save that the King's reeve had taken the place of 
the King, and that the Norman legislation had displaced the Bishop 
and set four Coroners by the Sheriffs side, the gathering of the free- 
holders remained much as of old. The local knighthood, the 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



yeomanty, the husbandmen of the county, were all represented in 
the crowd that gathered round the Sheriff, as, guarded by his liveried 
followers, he published the King's writs, announced his demand of aids, 
received the presentment of criminals and the inquests of the local 
jurors, assessed the taxation of each district, or listened solemnly to 
appeals for justice, civil and criminal, from all who held themselves 
oppressed in the lesser courts of the hundred or the soke. It was in 
the County Court alone that the Sheriff could legally summon the 
lesser baronage to attend the Great Council, and it was in the actual 
constitution of this assembly that the Crown found a solution of the 
difficulty which we have already stated. For the principle of repre- 
sentation by which it was finally solved was coeval with the Shire Court 
itself. In all cases of civil or criminal justice the twelve sworn assessors 
of the Sheriff represented the judicial opinion of the county at large. 
From every hundred came groups of twelve sworn deputies, the i 
"jurors," through whom the presentments of the district were made 
to the royal officer, and with whom the assessment of its share in 
the general taxation was arranged. The husbandmen on the outskirts 1 
of the crowd, clad in the brown smock frock which still lingers in the 1 
garb of our carters and ploughmen, were broken up into little knots 
of five, a reeve and four assistants, who formed the representatives 
of the rural townships. If, in fact, we regard the Shire Courts as 
lineally the descendants of our earliest English Parliaments, we may 
justly claim the principle of parliamentary representation as among 
the oldest of our institutions. But it was only slowly and tentatively that 
this principle was applied to the reconstitution of the Great Council. 
As early as the close of John's reign there are indications of the 
approaching change in the summons of " four discreet knights " from 
every county. Fresh need of local support was felt by both parties in 
the conflict of the succeeding reign, and Henry and his barons alike 
summoned knights from each shire "to meet on the common 
business of the realm." It was no doubt with the same purpose that 
the writs of Earl Simon ordered the choice of knights in each shire 
for his famous parliament of 1265. Something like a continuous 
attendance may be dated from the accession of Edward, but it was 
long before the knights were regarded as more than local deputies 
for the assessment of taxation, or admitted to a share in the general 
business of the Great Council. The statute "Quia Emptores," for 
instance, was passed in it before the knights who had been summoned 
could attend. Their participation in the deliberative power of Parlia- 
ment, as well as their regular and continuous attendance, dates only 
from the Parliament of 1295. But a far greater constitutional change 
in their position had already taken place through the extension of 
electoral rights to the freeholders at large. The one class entitled 
to a seat in the Great Council was, as we have seen, that of the 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



171 



lesser baronage, and of the lesser baronage alone the knights were in 
theoiy the representatives. But the necessity of holding their election 
in the County Court rendered any restriction of the electoral body 
physically impossible. The court v/as composed of the whole body of 
freeholders, and no sheriff could distinguish the "aye, aye" of the 
yeoman from the " aye, aye " of the squire. From the first moment, 
therefore, of their attendance we find the knights regarded not as i 
mere representatives of the baronage, but Knights of the Shire, and by 
this silent revolution the whole body of the rural freeholders were 
admitted to a share in the government of the realm. 

The financial difficulties of the Crown led to a far more radical 
revolution in the admission into the Great Council of representatives 
from the boroughs. The presence of Knights from each shire was, as we 
have seen, the recognition of an older right, but no right of attendance 
or share in the national " counsel and assent " could be pleaded for 
the burgesses of the towns. On the other hand, the rapid development 
of their wealth made them every day more important as elements in 
the national taxation. The towns had long since freed themselves 
from all payment of the dues or fines exacted by the King, as the 
original proprietor of the soil on which they had in most cases grown 
up, by what was called the purchase of the "' farm of the borough ;" in 
other words, by the commutation of those uncertain dues for a fixed 
sum paid annually to the Crown, and apportioned by their own 
magistrates among the general body of the burghers. All that the 
Crown legally retained was the right enjoyed by eveiy great proprietor of 
levying a corresponding taxation on its tenants in demesne under the 
]iame of " a free aid,'' whenever a grant was made for the national 
necessities by the barons of the Great Council. But the temptation of 
appropriating the growing wealth of the mercantile class proved stronger 
than legal restrictions, and we find both Henry the Third and his son 
assuming a right of imposing taxes at pleasure and without any autho- 
rity from the Council even over London itself. The burgesses could 
refuse indeed the invitation to contribute to the " free aid " demanded 
by the royal officers, but the suspension of their markets or trading pri- 
vileges soon brought them to submission. Each of these " free aids,'' 
however, had to be extorted after a long wrangle between the borough 
and the officers of the Exchequer; and if the towns were driven to 
comply with what they considered an extortion, they could generally 
force the Crown by evasions and delays to a compromise and abate- 
ment of its original demands. The same financial reasons, therefore, 
existed for desiring the presence of their representatives in the Great 
Council as existed in the case of the shires ; but it was the genius of 
Earl Simon which first broke through the older constitutional tradition, 
and dared to summon two burgesses from each town to the Parliament of 
1265. Time had, indeed, to pass before the large and statesmanlike con- 



172 



THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ception of the great patriot could meet with full acceptance. Through 
the earlier part of Edward's reign we find a few instances of the presence 
of representatives from the towns, but their scanty numbers and the 
irregularity of their attendance show that they were summoned rather 
to afford financial information to the Great Council than as represen- 
tatives in it of an Estate of the Realm. But every year pleaded stronger 
and stronger for the EarFs conception, and in the Parliament of 1295 
that of 1265 found itself at last reproduced. " It was from me that 
he learnt it," Earl Simon had cried, as he recognized the military skill 
of Edward's onset at Evesham ; "It was from me that he -learnt it," 
his spirit might have exclaimed, as he saw the King gathering at last 
two burgesses " from every city, borough, and leading town " within 
his realm to sit side by side with the knights, nobles, and barons of 
the Great Council. To the Crown the change was from the first an 
advantageous one. The grants of subsidies by the burgesses in Par- 
liament proved far more profitable than the previous extortions of the 
Exchequer. The proportion of their grant generally exceeded that of 
the other estates by a tenth. Their representatives too proved far more^ 
compliant with the royal will than the barons or knights of the shire ; 
only on one occasion during Edward's reign did the burgesses waver from 
their general support of the Crown. It was easy indeed to control them, 
for the selection of boroughs to be represented remained wholly in the 
King-'s hands, and their numbers could be increased or diminished at 
the King's pleasure. The determination was left to the sheriff, and 
at a hint from the royal council a sheriff of Wilts would cut down 
the number of represented boroughs in his shire from eleven to 
three, or a sheriff of Berks declare he could find but a single borough, 
that of Wycombe, within the bounds of the county. Nor was this 
exercise of the prerogative hampered by any anxiety on the part of 
the towns to claim representative privileges. It was difficult to suspect 
that a power before which the Crown would have to bow lay in th^ 
ranks of soberly clad traders, summoned only to assess the contri- 
butions of their boroughs, and whose attendance was as difficult to 
secure as it seemed burthensome to themselves and the towns who 
sent them. The mass of citizens took little or no part in their choice, 
for they were elected in the county court by a few of the principal 
burghers deputed for the purpose ; but the cost of their maintenance, 
the two shillings a day paid to the burgess by his town as four were 
paid to the knight by his county, was a burthen from which the 
boroughs made desperate efforts to escape. Some persisted in making 
no return to the sheriff till their names from sheer disuse dropped off 
the Parliament-roll. Some bought charters of exemption from the 
troublesome privilege. Of the 165 who were summoned by Edward 
the First, more than a third either took no notice of the writs whatever 
or ceased to do so after a single compliance with them. During the 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



173 



whole time from the reign of Edv/ard the Third to the reign of Henry 
the Sixth the sheriff of Lancashire dechned to return the names of' 
any boroughs at all within that county, " on account of their poverty/' 
Nor were the representatives themselves more anxious to appear than 
their boroughs to send them. The busy country squire and the thrifty 
trader were equally reluctant to undergo the trouble and expense of a 
journey to Westminster. Legal measures were often necessary to 
ensure their presence. Writs still exist in abundance such as that by 
which Walter le Rous is " held to bail in eight oxen and four cart- 
horses to come before the King on the day specified " for attendance 
in Parliament. But in spite of obstacles such as these the presence of 
representatives from the boroughs may be regarded as continuous from 
the Parliament of 1295. As the representation of the lesser barons had 
widened through a silent change into that of the shire, so that of the 
boroughs — restricted in theory to those in royal demesne — -seems 
practically from Edward's time to have been extended to all who were 
in a condition to pay the cost of their representatives' support. By 
a change as silent within the Parliament itself we shall soon see the 
burgess, originally summoned to take part only in matters of taxation, 
admitted to a full share in the deliberations and authority of the other 
orders of the State. 

The admission of the burgesses and knights of the shire to the 
assembly of 1295 completed the fabric of our representative consti- 
tution. The Great Council of the Barons had become the Parliament 
of the Realm, a parliament in which every order of the state found 
itself represented, and took part in the grant of supplies, the work of 
legislation, and the control of government. But though in all essential 
points the character of Parliament has remained the same from that 
time to this, there were some remarkable particulars in which this great 
assembly as it was left by Edward the First differed widely from the 
present Parliament at St. Stephen's. Some of these differences, such 
as those which sprang from the increased powers and changed relations 
of the different orders among themselves, we shall have occasion to 
consider at a later time. But a difference of a far more startling kind 
than these lay in the presence of the clergy. If there is any part in 
the Parliamentary scheme of Edward the First which can be regarded 
as especially his own, it is his project for the representation of the 
ecclesiastical order. The King had twice at least summoned its 
"proctors" to Parliament before 1295, but it was then only that the 
complete representation of the Church was definitely organized by 
the insertion of a clause in the writ which summoned a bishop to 
Parliament requiring the personal attendance of all archdeacons, 
deans, or priors of cathedral churches, of a proctor for each cathedral 
chapter, and two for the clergy within his diocese. The clause is 
repeated m the writs of the present day, but its practical effect was 



■174 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Cpiap 



foiled almost from the first by the resolute opposition of those to 
whom it was addressed. What the towns failed in doing the clergy 
actually did. Even when forced to comply with the royal summons, 
as they seem to have been forced during Edward's reign, they sat 
jealously by themselves, and their refusal to vote supplies .in any but 
their own provincial assemblies, or convocations, of Canterbury and 
York, left the Crown without a motive for insisting on their continued 
attendance. Their presence, indeed, though still occasionally granted 
on some solemn occasions, became so pure a formality that by the end 
of the fifteenth century it had sunk wholly into desuetude. In their 
anxiety to preserve their existence as an isolated and privileged order, 
the clergy flung away a power which, had they retained it, would have 
ruinously hampered the healthy development of the state. To take a 
single instance, it is diflicult to see how the great changes of the 
Reformation could have been brought about had a good half of the 
House of Commons consisted purely of Churchmen, whose numbers 
would have been backed by the weight of property as possessors of a 
third of the landed estates of the realm. A hardly less important 
difference may be found in the gradual restriction of the meetings of 
Parliament to Westminster. The names of the early statutes remind 
us of its convocation at the most various quarters, at Winchester, Acton 
Burnell, Northampton, or Oxford. It was at a later time that Parlia- 
ment became settled in the straggling village which had grown up in 
the marshy swamp of the Isle of Thorns, beside the palace whose 
embattled pile towered over the Thames and the great minster which 
was still rising in Edward's day on the site of the older church of the 
Confessor. It is possible that, while contributing greatly to its consti- 
tutional importance, this settlement of the Parliament may have helped 
to throw into the background its character as a supreme court of 
appeal. The proclamation by which it was called together invited " all 
who had any grace to demand of the King in Parliament, or any plaint 
to make of matters which could not be redressed or determined by 
ordinary course of law, or who had been in any way aggrieved by any 
of the King's ministers or justices or sheriffs, or their bailiffs, or any 
other officer, or have been unduly assessed, rated, charged or sur- 
charged to aids, subsidies, or taxes," to deliver their petitions to 
receivers who sat in the Great Hall of the- Palace of Westminster. 
The petitions were forwarded to the King's Council, and it was probably 
the extension of the jurisdiction of that body, and the subsequent rise 
of the Court of Chancery, which reduced this ancient right of the 
subject to the formal election of " Triers of Petitions '* at the opening 
of every new Parliament by the House of Lords, a usage which is still 
continued. But it must have been owing to some memory of the older 
custom that the subject alv/ays looked for redress against injuries from 
the Crown or its ministers to the Parliament of the realm. 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



175 



Section III,— The Conquest of Scotland, 1290— 1305. 

{^Authorities, — Scotland itself has no contemporary chronicles for this period: 
the Jingle of Blind Harry is two hundred years later than the death of its hero, 
Wallace. Those of England are meagre and inaccurate ; the most important 
are the **Annales Anglise Scotise" and ** Annales Regni Scotiae," Rishanger's 
Chronicle, his **Gesta Edwardi Primi," and three fragments of annals (all 
published by the Master of the Rolls), with the portion of the so-called 
Walsingham's History v/hich relates to this time, now attributed by its latest 
editor, Mr. Riley, to Rishanger's hand. Hemingford, though of somewhat 
later date, adds some interesting details. But the main source of our infor- 
mation lies in the copious collection of state papers preserved in Rymer's 
"Foedera,"in the "Rotuli Scotise," and in the ** Documents and Records 
illustrating the History of Scotland," edited by Sir F. Palgrave. Mr. Robertson, 
in his " Scotland under her Early Kings," has admirably illustrated the ages 
before the quarrel, and Mr. Burton in his History of Scotland has stated the 
quarrel itself with great accuracy and fairness. For Edward's side see the 
preface of Sir F. Palgrave to the work above, and Mr. Freeman's essay on 
" The Relations between the Crown of England and Scotland."] 



If the personal character of Edward the First had borne but a 
small part in the constitutional changes which we have described, it 
becomes of the highest moment during the war with Scotland which 
covers the latter half of his reign. 

In his own time, and amongst his own subjects, Edward was the 
object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense 
a national king. At the moment when the distinction between 
conquerors and conquered had passed away, and England felt herself 
once more a people, she saw in her ruler no stranger, but an English- 
man. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair 
or the English name which linked him to her earlier kings. Edward's 
very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands 
out as the typical representative of his race, wilful and imperious as his 
people, tenacious of his rights, indomxitable in his pride, dogged, 
stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but in the main 
just, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth 
and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious. He had 
inherited the fierce ruthlessness of the Angevins, so that when he 
punished his punishments were without pity, and a priest who had 
ventured into his presence with a remonstrance from his order dropped 
dead from sheer fright at his feet. But for the most part his impulses 
were generous, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgiveness. 
" No man ever asked mercy of me," he said in his old age, "and war. 



Sec. III. 

The Con- 
quest OF 
Scotland. 
1290- 
1305. 



Edward 
the First. 



176 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature breaks out at 
Falkirk, where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his 
refusal during a Welch campaign to drink of the one cask of wine I 
which had been saved from marauders : " It is I who have brought 
you into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, " and I will 
have no advantage of you in meat or driak." A strange tenderness 
and sensitiveness to affection lay in fact beneath the stern impe- 
riousness of his outer bearing. Every yeoman throughout his realm 
was drawn closer to the King who wept bitterly at the news of his 
father's death, though it gave him a crown ; whose fiercest burst of 
vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother ; whose crosses 
rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's 
bier rested. " I loved her tenderly in her lifetime," wrote Edward to 
Eleanor's friend, the Abbot of Clugny ; " I do not cease to love her » 
now she is dead." And as it was with wife and child, so it was with I 
hie people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the earlier ' 
Angevins disappears in Edward. He is the first English kin^- since 
the Conquest who loves his people with a personal love, and craves for 
their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, 
to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of 
our laws. But even in his struggles with her England understood a 
temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between King 
and people during his reign are quarrels where, fiercely as they fought, 
neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the 
other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than that which 
closes the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to 
face with his people in Westminster Hall, and with a sudden burst of 
tears owned himself frankly in the wrong. 

But it was just this sensitiveness, this openness to outer impressions 
and outer influences, that led to the strange contradictions which meet us 
in Edward's career. Under the first king whose temper was distinctly 
EngHsh a foreign influence told most fatally on our manners, our 
literature, our national spirit. The sudden rise of France into a 
compact and organized monarchy from the time of Philip Augustus had 
now made its influence dominant in Western Europe. The " chivalry" 
so familiar in Froissart, with its picturesque mimicry of high sentiment, 
of heroism, love, and courtesy — a mimicry before which all depth and 
reality of nobleness disappeared to make room for the coarsest pro- 
fligacy, the narrowest caste-spirit, and a brutal indifference to human 
suffering — was specially of French creation. There was a nobleness 
in Edward's nature from which the baser influences of chivalry fell 
away. His life was pure, his piety even when it stooped to the super- 
stition of the time manly and sincere, while his high sense of duty 
saved him from the frivolous self-indulgence of his successors. But 
he was far from being wholly free from the taint of his age. His 



EV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



177 



passionate desire was to be a model of the fashionable knighthood 
of his day. He had been famous from his very youth as a consum- 
mate general ; Earl Simon had admired the skill of his advance at 
Evesham, and in his Welsh campaign he had shown a tenacity and 
force of will which wrested victory out of the midst of defeat. He could 
head a furious charge of horse at Lewes, or organize a commissariat 
which enabled him to move army after army across the harried Low- 
lands. In his old age he was quick to discover the value of the 
Enghsh archery, and to employ it as a means of victory at Falkirk. 
But his fame as a general seemed a small thing to Edward in com- 
parison with his fame as a knight. He shared to the full his people's 
love of hard fighting. His frame, indeed, was that of a born soldier — 
tall, deep-chested, long of limb, capable alike of endurance or action. 
While fresh from the triumph of Evesham, he encountered Adam 
Gurdon, a famous freebooter, and single-handed forced him to beg for 
mercy. At the opening of his reign he saved his life by sheer hard 
figh^mg in a tournament at Chalons. He was the first sovereign 
to introduce the sham warfare of the Tournament into England, 
where it had been rigidly prohibited by his predecessors and for- 
bidden by the Church. We see the frivolous unreality of the new 
chivalry in his " Round Table " at Kenilworth, where a hundred 
knights and ladies, "clad all in silk," renewed the faded glories of 
Arthur's Court. The false air of romance which was soon to turn the 
gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling 
appears in his " Vow of the Swan," when, rising at the royal board, the 
old man swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the 
murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence 
in its narrowing of all sympathy to the noble class^ and its exclusion 
of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. It is the 
" knight without reproach " who looks calmly on at the massacre of 
Berwick, and sees in Wilham Wallace nothing but a common robber. 
Hardly less powerful than the French notion of chivalry in its influ- 
ence on Edward's mind was the new French conception of kingship, 
feudality, and law. The rise of a lawyer class was everywhere harden- 
ing customary into written rights, allegiance into subjection, loose ties 
such as commendation into a definite vassalage. But it was specially 
through French influence, the influence of St. Lewis and his successors, 
that the imperial theories of the Roman Law were brought to bear upon 
this natural tendency of the time. When the " sacred majesty" of the 
Caesars was transferred by a legal fiction to the royal head of a feudal 
baronage, every constitutional relation was radically changed. The 
'' defiance " by which a vassal renounced service to his lord became 
treason, his after resistance " sacrilege." That Edward could appre- 
ciate what was sound and noble in the legal spirit around him was 
shown in his reforms of our judicature and our Parliament ; but there 

N 



178 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



was something even more congenial to his mind in its definiteness, 
its rigidity, its narrow technicahties. He was never wilfully unjust, 
but he was captious in his justice, fond of legal chicanery, prompt to 
take advantage of the letter of the law. He was never wilfully un- 
truthful ; his abhorrence of falsehood showed itself in the words of his 
motto, " Keep Troth," but he kept his troth in the spirit of a peddling 
attorney. The high conception of royalty which he had borrowed 
from St. Lewis united with this legal turn of mind in the worst acts of 
his reign. Of rights or liberties unregistered in charter or roll 
Edward would know nothing. On the other hand, he was himself 
overpowered by the majesty of his crown. It was incredible to him 
that Scotland should revolt against a legal bargain which made her 
national independence conditional on the terms extorted from a 
claimant of her throne : nor could he view in any other light but as 
treason the resistance of his own baronage to an arbitrary taxation 
which their fathers had borne. It is in the very anomalies of such a 
character, in its strange union of justice and wrong-doing, of noble- 
ness and meanness, that we must look for the explanation of Edward's 
conduct and policy in his later years. 

Fairly to understand his quarrel with the Scots, we must clear our 
minds of the ideas which we now associate with the words " Scotland," 
or the " Scotch people/^ At the opening of the fourteenth century the 
kingdom of the Scots was an aggregate of at least four distinct 
countries, each with its different people, its different tongue, its 
different history. The first of these was the district once called 
'^ Saxony,^^ and which now bears the name of the Lowlands, the space, 
roughly speaking, between the Forth and the Tweed. We have seen 
that at the close of the English conquest of Britain the kingdom of 
Northumbria stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, and 
of this kingdom the Lowlands formed simply the northern portion. 
The English conquest and the English colonization were as complete 
here as over the rest of Britain. Rivers and hills indeed retained 
their Celtic names, but the " tons " and " hams " scattered over the 
country told the story of its Teutonic settlement. Dodings and 
Levings left their name to Dodington and Livingston : Elphinston and 
Edmundston preserved the memory of Enghsh Elfins and Edmunds 
who had raised their homesteads along the Teviot and the Tweed. 
To the northward and westward of this Northumbrian land lay the 
kingdoms of the conquered. Over the " Waste '' or " Desert ^' — the 
range of barren moors which stretches from Derbyshire to the Cheviots 
— the Briton had sought a refuge in the long strip of coast between the 
Clyde and the Dee which formed the earlier Cumbria. Against this 
kingdom the efforts of the Northumbrian rulers had been incessantly 
directed ; the victory of Chester had severed it from the Welsh king- 
doms to the south ; Lancashire, Westmoreland^ and Cumberland were 



IV.] 



THE "i 



RDS. 



179 



already subdued by the time o. ^cgfrith ; while the wretched frag- 
ment which was suffered to remain unconquered between the Firths 
of Solway and of Clyde, and to which the name of Cumbria is in its 
later use confined, owned the English supremacy. At the close of 
the seventh century, indeed, it seemed likely that the same supremacy 
would extend over the Welsh tribes to the north. To these Picts of the 
Highlands the land south of the Forth was a foreign land, and signifi- 
cant entries in their rude chronicles tell us how in their forays " the 
Picts made a raid upon Saxony." But they had long bowed to a 
vague acknowledgment of the English over-lordship : the English 
fortress of Edinburgh looked menacingly across the Forth, and at 
Abercorn beside it was established an Enghsh prelate with the title 
of Bishop of the Picts. Ecgfrith, in whose hands the power of Northum- 
bria reached its highest point, marched across Forth to change this 
over-lordship into a direct dominion, and to bring the series of English 
victories to a close. His host poured burning and ravaging across 
the Tay, and skirted the base of the Grampians as far as the field of 
Nectansmere, where King Bruidi awaited them at the head of the 
Picts. The great battle which followed proved a turning-point in the 
history of the North ; the invaders were cut to pieces, Ecgfrith himself 
being among the slain, and the power of Northumbria was broken for 
ever. On the other hand, the kingdom of the Picts started into new 
life with its great victor}^, and pushed its way in the hundred years 
that followed westward, eastward, and southward, till the whole country 
north of the Forth and the Clyde acknowledged its supremacy. But 
the hour of Pictish greatness was marked by the sudden extinction of 
the Pictish name. Centuries before, when the English invaders were 
beginning to harry the south coast of Britain, a fleet of coracles had 
borne a tribe of the Scots, as the inhabitants of Ireland wxre at that 
time called, from the white cliff-walls of Antrim to the rocky and 
indented coast of South Argyle. The little kingdom of Scot-land which 
these Irishmen founded slumbered in obscurity among the lakes and 
mountains to the south of Loch Lynne, now submitting to the over- 
lordship of Northumbria, now to that of the Picts, till the extinction 
of the direct Pictish line of sovereigns raised the Scot King, Kenneth 
Mac-alpin, who chanced to be their nearest kinsman, to the vacant 
throne. For fifty years these rulers of Scottish blood still call them- 
selves " Kings of the Picts ; " but with the opening of the tenth cen- 
tury the very name passes awa}^, the tribe which had given its chief 
to the common throne gives its designation to the common realm, 
and "Pict-land" vanishes from the page of the chronicler or annalist 
to make way for the " land of the Scots." 

It was even longer before the change made way among the people 
itself, and the real union of the nation with its kings was only effected 
by the common suffering of the Danish wars. In the north, as in the 

N 2 



i8o 



HISTORY OF TLE BNGMSE PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



south of Britain, the invasion .f th : s brought about political 

unity. Not only were Picts and - ^hly blended into a single 

people, but by the annexation md the Lowlands, their 

monarchs became rulers of the te ricory ? :h we now call Scotland. 
The annexation was owing to the new poiicr of the English Kings. 
Their aim, after the long struggle .; ' ''l.xgiand with the Northmen, 
was no longer to crush the kingdom across the Forth, but to raise it 
into a bulwark against the Danes who were still settled in Caithness 
and the Orkneys, and for whose aggressions Scotland was the natural 
highway. On the other hand, it was only in Enghsh aid that the Scot 
Kings could find a support for their throne against these Danish Jarls 
of Orkney and Caithness. It was probably this common hostility to 
a common foe which brought about the " commendation " by which 
the Scots beyond the Forth, with the Welsh of Strath-clyde, chose the 
English King, Eadward the Elder, " to father and lord." The choice, 
whatever weight after events may have given to it, seems to have 
been little more than the renewal of the loose English supremacy 
over the tribes of the North which had existed during the times of 
Northumbrian greatness ; it certainly implied at the time nothing 
save a right on either side to military aid, though the aid then 
rendered was necessarily placed in the hands of the stronger party 
to the agreement. Such a connection naturally ceased in the 
event cf any war between the two contracting parties ; it was in fact 
by no means the feudal vassalage of a later time, but rather such 
a military convention as existed after Sadowa between the North- 
German Confederation and the States south of the Mein. But loose 
as was the tie which bound the two countries, a closer tie soon bound 
the Scot King himself to his English overlord. Strath-clyde, v/hich, 
after the defeat of Nectansmere, had shaken off the English yoke, and 
which at a later time had owned the supremacy of the Scots, rose into 
a temporary independence only to be conquered by the English 
Eadmund. By him it was granted to Malcolm of Scotland on the 
feudal tenure of distinct military service, and became from that time 
the appanage of the eldest son of the Scottish king. At a later time, 
under Eadgar or Cnut, the whole of Northern Northumbria, or what 
we now call the Lothians, was ceded to the Scottish sovereigns, but 
whether on the same terms of feudal dependence as an ordinary English 
earldom or on the same loose terms of " commendation " as already 
existed for lands north of the Forth, we have no means of deciding. 
The retreat, however, of the bounds of the great English bishoprick 
of the North, the see of St. Cuthbert, as far southward as the Pentland 
Hills, would seem to imply a greater change in the pohtical character 
of the ceded district than the first theory would allow. 

Whatever change these cessions may have brought about in the 
relation of the Scot Kings to their English overlords, they certainly 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



i8r 



affected in a very marked way their relation both to England and to Sec, hi. 
their own realm. The first result of the acquisition of the Lowlands | the Con- 
was the fixing of the royal residence in their new southern dominions ^^^^1 °^ 
at Edinburgh ; and the English civilization with which they were then 1290-' 
surrounded changed the Scot Kings in all but blood into Englishmen. I3C5. 
A way soon opened itself to the English crown by the marriage of 
Malcolm with Margaret, the sister of Eadgar Etheling. Their children 
were regarded by a large party within England as representatives of 
the older royal race and as claimants of the throne, and this danger 
grew as the terrible Norman devastation of the North not only drove 
fresh multitudes of Englishmen to settle in the Lowlands, but filled the 
Scotch Court with English nobles who had fled thither for refuge. 
So formidable, indeed, became the pretensions of the Scot Kings, that 
they forced the ablest of our Norman sovereigns into a complete 
change of policy. The Conqueror and William the Red had met the 
threats of the Scot sovereigns by invasions which ended again and 
again in an illusory hom.age. The marriage of Henry the First 
with the Scottish princess Matilda not only robbed of their force the 
claims of the Scottish line, but enabled him to draw it into far closer 
relations with the Norman throne. King David not only abandoned 
the ambitious dreams of his predecessors, to place himself at the 
head of his niece Matilda^s party in her contest with Stephen, but as 
Henry's brother-in-law he figured as the first noble of the English 
Court, and found English models and English support in the work of 
organization which he attempted within his own dominions. As the 
marriage with Margaret had changed Malcolm from a Celtic chieftain 
into an English King, so that of Matilda converted David into a David. 
Norman and feudal sovereign. His Court was filled with Norman 
nobles from the South, such as the Balliols and Bruces who were 
destined to play so great a part afterwards but who now for the first 
time obtained fiefs in the Scottish realm, and a feudal jurisprudence 
modelled on that of England was introduced into the Lowlands. 
Throughout these changes of front, however, both at home and abroad, 
the question of the English over-lordship remained unchanged. It 
was the capture of William the Lion during the revolt of the English 
baronage which first suggested to the ambition of Henry the Second 
the project of a closer dependence of Scotland on the English Crown. 
To gain his freedom, William consented to hold his crown of Henry 
and his heirs, the prelates and lords of the Scotch kingdom did 
homage to Henry as to their direct lord, and a right of appeal in all 
Scotch causes was allowed to the superior court of the English 
suzerain. From this bordage, however, Scotland was soon freed by 
the wise prodigality of Richard, who allowed her to repurchase the 
freedom she had forfeited, and from that time the dif^culties of the 
older claim were prudently evaded by a legal compromise. The Scot 



lS2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Ch/vp. 



King repeatedly did homage, but with a distinct protest that it was 
rendered for lands which he held in fief within the realm of England. 
The English King accepted the homage with a counter-protest that it 
was rendered to him as overlord of the Scottish realm. But for nearly 
a hundred years the relations of the two countries had remained 
peaceful and friendly, when the death of Alexander the Third seemed 
destined to remove even the necessity of protests by a closer union of 
the two kingdoms. Alexander had left but a single grandchild, the 
daughter of the Norwegian King, and after long negotiation the Scotch 
Parliament proposed the marriage of " the Maid of Norway" with the 
son of Edward the First. It was, however, carefully provided in the 
marriage treaty of Brigham that Scotland should remain a separate 
and free kingdom, and that its laws and customs should be preserved 
inviolate. No military aid was to be claimed by the English King, 
no Scotch appeal to be carried to an English court. The project, 
however, was abruptly frustrated by the child's death on her voyage 
to Scotland, and with the rise of claimant after claimant of the vacant 
throne Edward was drawn into far other relations to the Scottish realm. 

Of the thirteen pretenders to the throne of Scotland, only three 
could be regarded as serious claimants. By the extinction of the line 
of William the Lion the right of succession passed to the daughters 
of his brother David, and the claim of John Balliol, Lord of Galloway, 
rested on his descent from the elder of these, that of Robert Bruce, 
Lord of Annandale, on his descent from the second, that of John 
Hastings, Lord of Abergavenny, on his descent from the third. 

It is clear that at this crisis everyone in Scotland or out of it 
recognized some sort of over-lordship in Edward, for the Norwegian 
King, the Primate of St. Andrews, and seven of the Scotch Earls, had 
already appealed to him before Margaret's death, and the death itself 
was followed by the consent of both the claimants and the Council of 
Regency to refer the question of the succession to his decision in a 
Parliament at Norham. But the over-lordship which the Scots 
acknowledged was something far less direct and definite than what 
Edward claimed at the opening of this conference. The royal claim 
was supported by excerpts from monastic chronicles, and by the slow 
advance of an English army, while the Scotch lords, taken by surprise, 
found little help in the delay which was granted them, and at last, in 
common with the claimants themselves, formally admitted Edward's 
direct suzerainty. To the nobles, in fact, the concession must have 
seemed a small one ; like the principal claimants they were for the 
most part Norman in blood, with estates in both countries, and looking 
for honours and pensions from the English Court. From the Commons 
no admission of Edward's claims could be extorted, but in Scotland, 
feudalized as it had been by David, the Commons were as yet of little 
weight, and their opposition was quietly passed by. All the rights of 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



183 



a feudal suzerain were at once assumed by the English King ; he entered 
into the possession of the country as into that of a disputed fief to be 
held by its over-lord till the dispute was settled, his peace was sworn 
throughout the land, its castles delivered into his charge, while 
its bishops and nobles swore homage to him directly as their lord 
superior. Scotland was thus reduced to the subjection which she had 
experienced under Henry the Second, but the full discussion which 
followed over the various claims to the throne showed, that while 
exacting to the full what he beheved to be his right, Edward desired 
to do justice to the country itself. The body of commissioners which 
the King nominated were mainly Scotch, a proposal for the partition 
of the realm among the claimants was rejected as contrary to Scotch 
law, and the claim of Balliol as representative of the elder branch 
preferred to that of his rivals. 

The castles v/ere at once delivered to the new monarch, and Balliol 
did homage to Edward with full acknowledgment of the services due 
to him from the realm of Scotland. For a time there was peace. 
Edward in fact seemed to have no desire to push farther the rights of 
his crown. Even allowing that Scotland was a dependent kingdom, it 
was far from being according to feudal custom an ordinary fief. A dis- 
tinction had always been held to exist between the relation of a dependent 
king to his superior lord and those of a vassal noble to his sovereign. 
At Balliol's homage, Edward had disclaimed, in strict accordance with 
the marriage treaty of Brigham, any right to the ordinary incidents of 
a fief, those of wardship or marriage ; but there were other customs of 
the realm of Scotland as incontestable as these. Ecclesiastically, 
Scotland was independent of any see but that of Rome. Its sovereign 
again had never been held bound to attend the Council of the English 
Baronage, to do service in English warfare, or to contribute on the 
part of his Scotch possessions to English aids. No express acknowledg- 
ment of these rights had been given by Edward, but for a time they 
were practically observed. The right of free justice was as clear as 
the rest. Since the days of William the Lion no appeal from a 
Scotch King's Court to that of his overlord had been allowed, and the 
judicial independence of Scotland had been expressly acknowledged in 
the marriage treaty. This right of appeal Edward now determined 
to enforce, and Balliol at first gave way. The resentment, however, 
both of his Baronage and his people, forced him to resist ; and while 
appearing formally at Westminster he refused to answer an appeal 
save by the advice of his Council. He was in fact looking to France, 
which, as we shall afterwards see, was .jealously watching Edward's 
proceedings, and ready to force him into war. By a new breach of 
customiary law Edward summoned the Scotch nobles to follow him in 
arms against this foreign foe. But the summons was disregarded, 
^nd a second and formal refusal of aid was followed by a secret 



184 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



alliance with France and by a Papal absolution of Balliol from his 
oath of fealty. 

Edward was still reluctant to begin the war, when his scruples were 
relieved by the refusal of Balliol to attend his Parliament at Newcastle, 
the massacre of a small body of English troops, and the investment of 
Carlisle by the Scots. Orders were at once given for an advance 
upon Berwick. The taunts of its citizens stung the King to the quick 
" Kynge Edward, waune thou havest Berwick, pike thee ; waune thou 
havest geten, dike thee," they shouted from behind the wooden stockade, 
which formed the only rampart of the town. But the stockade was 
stormed with the loss of a single knight, and nearly eight thousand of 
the citizens were mown down in a ruthless carnage, while a handful 
of Flemish traders who held the town-hall stoutly against all assailants 
were burned alive in it. The massacre only ceased when a procession 
of priests bore the host to the King's presence, praying for mercy, and 
Edward with a sudden and characteristic burst of tears called off his 
troops ; but the town was ruined for ever, and the great merchant city 
of the North sank from that time into a petty seaport. At Berwick 
Edward received BallioFs defiance. " Has the fool done this folly ? ^ 
the King cried in haughty scorn. "If he will not come to us, we will 
come to him." The terrible slaughter, however, had done its work, 
and his march was a triumphal progress. Edinburgh, Stirling, and 
Perth opened their gates, Bruce joined the English army, and Balliol 
himself surrendered and passed without a blow from his throne to an 
English prison. No further punishment, however, was exacted from 
the prostrate realm. Edward simply treated it as a fief, and declared 
its forfeiture to be the legal consequence of BallioFs treason. It lapsed 
in fact to the overlord, and its earls, barons, and gentry swore homage 
in Parliament at Berwick to Edward as their king. The sacred stone 
on which its older sovereigns had been installed, an oblong block of 
limestone, which legend asserted to have been the pillow of Jacob as 
angels ascended and descended upon him, was removed from Scone 
and placed in Westminster by the shrine of the Confessor. It was 
enclosed by Edward's order in a stately seat, which became from that 
hour the coronation chair of English kings. 

To the King himself the whole business must have seemed another 
and easier conquest of Wales, and the mercy and just government 
which had followed his first success followed his second also. The 
government of the new dependency was entrusted to Warrenne, Earl 
of Surrey, at the head of an English Council of Regency. Pardon 
was freely extended to all who had resisted the invasion, and order 
and public peace were rigidly enforced. But both the justice and 
injustice of the new rule proved fatal to it ; the wrath of the Scots, 
already kindled by the intrusion of English priests into Scotch livings, 
and by the grant of lands across the border to English barons, v^as 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



185 



fanned to fury by the strict administration of law, and the repression 
of feuds and cattle-hfting. The disbanding, too, of troops, which was 
caused by tlie penuiy of the royal exchequer, united with the licence 
of the soldiery who remained as a protection of the English rule to 
quicken the national sense of wrong. The disgraceful submission of 
their leaders brought the people themselves to the front. In spite of a 
hundred years of peace the farmer of the Lowlands and the artisan of 
the towns remained stout-hearted Northumbrian Englishmen ; they had 
never consented to Edward^s supremacy, and their blood rose against the 
insolent rule of the stranger. The genius of an outlaw knight, Wilham 
Wallace, saw in their smouldering discontent a hope of freedom for 
his country, and his daring raids on outlying parties of the English 
soldiery soon roused the Lowlands into revolt. Of Wallace himself, 
of his life or temper, we know little or nothing ; the very traditions of 
his gigantic stature and enormous strength are dim and unhistorical. 
But the instinct of the Scotch people has guided it aright in choosing 
Wallace for its national hero. He was the first to sweep aside the 
technicalities of feudal law and to assert freedom as a national birthright. 
Amidst the despair of nobles and priests he called the people itself to 
arms, and his discovery ^of the military value of the stout peasant 
footman, who had till then been scorned by baronage and knighthood — 
a discovery copied by the burghers of Flanders, and repeated in the 
victories of the Swiss — gave a deathblow to the system of feudalism 
and changed in the end the face of Europe. At the head of an army 
drawn principally from the coast districts north of the Tay, which were 
inhabited by a population of the same blood as that of the Lowlands, 
Wallace occupied the valley near Stirling, the pass between the north 
and the south, and awaited the English advance. The offers of Earl 
Warrenne were scornfully rejected : " We have come here," said the 
Scottish leader, " not for peace, but to free our countr}^" The position 
of Wallace, a semicircle of hills behind a loop of Forth, was in fact 
chosen with consummate skill. The one bridge which crossed the 
river v/as only broad enough to admit two horsemen abreast ; and 
though the English army had been passing from daybreak, only half 
its force was across at noon when Wallace closed on it and cut it, 
after a short combat, to pieces, in the sight of its helpless comrades. 
The retreat of Warrenne over the border left Wallace head of the 
country he had freed, and for a time we find him acting as " Guardian 
of the Realm " in Balliors name, and heading a wild foray into 
Northumberland. His reduction of Stirling Castle at last called 
Edward to the field. The King, who marched northward with a 
larger host than had ever followed his banner, was enabled by treachery 
to surprise Wallace, as he fell back to avoid an engagement, and 
to force him to battle near Falkirk. The Scotch force still con- 
sisted almost wholly of foot, and Wallace drew up his spearmen in 



1 86 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



four great hollow circles or squares, the outer ranks kneeling, and the 
whole supported by bowmen within, while a small force of horse were 
drawn up as a reserve in the rear. It was the formation of Waterloo, 
the first appearance in our history since the day of Senlac of "that 
unconquerable British infantry," before which chivalry was destined to 
go down. For a moment it had all Waterloo's success. " I have brought 
you to the ring, hop (dance) if you can," are words of rough humour 
that reveal the very soul of the patriot leader, and the serried ranks 
answered well to his appeal. The Bishop of Durham who led the 
Enghsh van shrunk wisely from the look of the squares. "Back to 
your mass, Bishop," shouted the reckless knights behind him, but the 
body of horse dashed itself vainly on the wall of spears. Terror 
spread through the English army, and its Welsh auxiliaries drew off 
in a body from the field, till the generalship of Wallace was met by that 
of the King. Drawing his bowmen to the front, Edward riddled the 
Scottish ranks with arrows, and then hurled his cavalry afresh on the 
wavering front. In a moment all was over, and the maddened knights 
rode in and out of the broken ranks, slaying without mercy. 
Thousands fell on the field, Wallace himself escaped with difficulty, 
followed by a handful of men. But ruined as the cause of freedom 
seemed, his work was done ; he had roused Scotland into life, and 
even a defeat like Falkirk left her unconquered. Edward remained 
master of the ground he stood on ; and as soon as want of supplies 
forced him to retreat, a native regency of the nobles under Bruce and 
Comyn continued the struggle for independence. For a time dangers 
from abroad stayed Edward's hand ; France was still menacing, and a 
claim advanced by Pope Boniface the Eighth, at its suggestion, to the 
feudal superiority over Scotland, arrested a fresh advance of the King. 
The quarrel, however, between Philip le Bel and the Papacy which 
soon followed, removed all obstacles, and enabled him to defy 
Boniface and to wring from France a treaty in which Scotland was 
abandoned. Edward at once resumed the work of invasion, and again 
the nobles flung down their arms as he marched to the North. Comyn, 
at the head of the Regency, acknowledged his sovereignty, and the 
surrender of Stirling completed the conquest of Scotland. The 
triumph of Edward was but the prelude to the full execution of his 
designs for knitting the two countries together by a clemency and 
wisdom which reveal the greatness of his statesmanship. A general' 
amnesty was extended to all who had shared in the revolt. Wallace, 
who refused indeed to avail himself of Edward's mercy, was cap- 
tured, and condemned to death at Westminster on charges of 
treason, sacrilege, and robbery. The head of the great patriot, 
crowned in mockery v/ith a circlet of laurel, was placed upon London 
Bridge. But the execution of Wallace was the one blot on Edward's 
clemency. With a masterly boldness he entrusted the government of 



JV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



187 



the country to a council of Scotch nobles, many of whom were freshly 
pardoned for their share in the war, and anticipated the policy of 
Cromwell by allotting ten representatives to Scotland in the Common 
Parliament of his realm. A Convocation was summoned at Perth 
for the election of these representatives, and a great judicial scheme 
which was promulgated in this assembly adopted the amended laAvs 
of David as the base of a new legislation, and divided the country 
for judicial purposes into four districts, Lothian, Galloway, the High- 
lands, and the land between the Highlands and the Forth, at the head 
of each of which were placed two justiciaries, the one English and the 
other Scotch. 

Section IV.— The English Town. 

[Auihorities. — For the General History of London see its *' Liber Albus " 
and '* Liber Custumarum," in the series of the Master of the Rolls ; for its 
Communal Revolution, the ** Liber de Antiquis Legibus," edited by Mr. 
Stapleton for the Camden Society ; for the rising of William Longbeard, the 
story in WilHam of Newborough. In his ** Essay on English Municipal His- 
tory" (1867), Mr. Thompson has given a useful account of the relations of 
Leicester with its Earls. A great store of documents will be found in the 
Charter Rolls pubHshed by the Record Commission, in Brady's work on 
English Boroughs, and (though rather for Parliamentary purposes) in Stephen's 
and Merewether's ** History of Boroughs and Corporations." But the only 
full and scientific examination of our early municipal history, at least on one of 
its sides, is to be found in the Essay prefixed by Dr.' Brentano to the '' Ordinances 
of English Gilds," published by the Early English Text Society.] 

From scenes such as we have been describing, from the wrong and 
bloodshed of foreign conquest, we pass to the peaceful life and progress 
of England itself. 

Through the reign of the three Edwards two revolutions, which 

have been almost ignored by our historians, were silently changing 

the whole character of English society. The first of these, the rise ol" 

a new class of tenant-farmers, we shall have to notice hereafter in its 

connection with the great agrarian revolt which bears the name of 

Wat Tyler. The second, the rise of the Craftsmen within our towns, 

I and the struggle by which they won power and privilege from the 

i older burghers, is the most remarkable event in the period of our 

I national history at which we have arrived. 

I We have already briefly described the outer progress of the earlier 
English boroughs. In England the town was originally, in every case 
i save that of London, a mere bit of land within the lordship, whether 
I of the king or some great noble or ecclesiastic, whose inhabit- 
ants happened, either for purposes of trade or protection, to cluster 
I together more closely than elsewhere. It is this characteristic of our 
j boroughs that separates them at once from the cities of Italy and 
Provence, which had preserved the municipal institutions of their « 



Sec. hi. 
The Con- 

Q'^EST OF 

Scotland, 
1290- 
1305. 



The Early 

English 

Boroughs 



i88 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Roman origins, from the German towns founded by Henry the Fowler 
with the special purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppres- 
sion around them, or from the French communes which at a later 
time sprang into existence in sheer revolt against feudal outrage 
within their walls. In England the tradition of Rome had utterly 
passed away, while the oppression of feudalism was held fairly in i 
check by the power of the Crown. The English town, therefore, was I 
in its beginning simply a piece of the general country, organized and 
governed in the same way as the manors around it, that is to say, 
justice was administered, its annual rent collected, and its customary 
services exacted by the reeve or steward of the lord to whose estate 
it belonged. To modern eyes the subjection which these services 
involved might seem complete. When Leicester, for instance, passed 
from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its Earls, its townsmen 
were bound to reap their lord's corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to 
redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. The great forest around 
was the Earl's, and it was only out of his grace that the little borough 
could drive its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in the 
glades. The justice and government of the town lay wholly in its 
master's hands ; he appointed its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeit- 
ures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their markets and fairs. 
But when once these dues were paid and these services rendered the 
English townsman was practically free. His rights were as rigidly 
defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and person alike 
were secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a fair trial 
on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his master's 
reeve it was administered in the presence and with the assent of his 
fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town tower 
gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could 
exercise rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own 
affairs. Their merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distri- 
buted the sums due from the town among the different burgesses, 
looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and acted, in fact, pretty | 
much the same part as a town-council of to-day. Not only, too, were t 
these rights secured by custom from the. first, but they were constantly I 
widening as time went on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner \ 
history of an English town, we find the same peaceful revolution in 
progress, services disappearing, through disuse or omission, while 
privileges and immunitites are being purchased in hard cash. The 
lord of the town, whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly 
thriftless or poor, and the capture of a noble, or the campaign of a j 
sovereign, or the building of some new minster by a prior, brought ! 
about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again 
their master's treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which 
gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of government. Some- 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



1S9 



times a chance story lights up for us this work of emancipation. At 
Leicester, one of the chief aims of its burgesses was to regain their 
old Enghsh jury trial (or practice of compurgation) which had been 
abolished by the Earls in favour of the foreign trial by duel. " It 
chanced," says a charter of the time, " that two kinsmen, Nicholas the 
son of Aeon, and Geoffrey the son of Nicholas, waged a duel about a 
certain piece of land, concerning which a dispute had arisen between 
them ; and they fought from the first to the ninth hour, each conquer- 
ing by turns. Then one of them fleeing from the other till he came to 
a certain little pit, as he stood on the brink of the pit, and was about to 
fall therein, his kinsman said to him ' Take care of the pit, turn back 
lest thou shouldest fall in to it.' Thereat so much clamour and noise 
was made by the bystanders and those who were sitting around, that 
the Earl heard these clamours as far off as the castle, and he inquired 
of some how it v/as there was such a clamour, and answer was made 
to him that two kinsmen were fighting about a certain piece of ground, 
and that one had fled till he reached a certain httle pit, and that as he 
stood over the pit and was about to fall into it the other warned him. 
Then the townsmen being moved with pity, made a covenant with the 
Earl that they should give him threepence yearly for each house in the 
High Street that had a gable, on condition that he should grant to 
them that the twenty-four jurors who were in Leicester from ancient 
times should from that time forward discuss and decide all pleas they 
might have among themselves." For the most part the liberties of 
our towns were bought in this way, by sheer hard bargaining. The 
earliest English charters, save that of London, date from the years 
when the treasury of Henry the First was drained by his Norman 
wars; and grants of municipal liberty made professedly by the Angevins 
are probably the result of their costly employment of mercenary 
troops. At the close, however, of the thirteenth century, this work of 
outer emancipation was practically complete All the more important 
English towns had secured the right of justice in their own borough- 
courts, of self-government, and of self-taxation, and their liberties and 
charters served as models and incentives to the smaller communities 
which were struggling into life. 

During the progress of this outer revolution, the inner life of the 
English town was in the same quiet and hardly conscious way deve- 
loping itself from the common form of the life around it into a form 
especially its own. Within as without the ditch or stockade which 
formed the first boundary of the borough, land was from the first the 
test of freedom, and the possession of land was what constituted the 
townsman. We may take, perhaps, a foreign instance to illustrate this 
fundamental point in our municipal history. When Duke Berthold of 
Zahringen resolved to found Freiburg, his ' free town,' in the Brisgau, 
the mode he adopted was to gather a group of traders together, and to 



190 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



give each man a plot of ground for his freehold round what was des- 
tined to be the market-place of the new community. In England the 
' landless ' man had no civic as he had no national existence ; the 
' town ' was simply an association of the landed proprietors within its 
bounds ; nor was there anything in this association, as it originally 
existed, which could be considered peculiar or exceptional. The 
constitution of the English town, however different its form may have 
afterwa.rds become, was at the first simply that of the people at large. 
We have before seen that among the German races society rested on 
the basis of the family, that it was the family who fought and settled 
side by side, and the kinsfolk who were bound together in ties of 
mutual responsibility to each other and to the law. As society became 
more complex and less stationary it neccessarily outgrew these simple 
ties of blood, and in England this dissolution of the family bond seems 
to have taken place at the very time when Danish incursions and the 
growth of a feudal temper among the nobles rendered an isolated 
existence most perilous for the freeman. His only resource was to seek 
protection among his fellow-freemen, and to replace the older brother- 
hood of the kinsfolk by a voluntary association of his neighbours for the 
same purposes of order and self-defence. The tendency to unite in 
such ' Frith-gilds ^ or Peace-clubs became general throughout Europe 
during the ninth and tenth centuries, but on the Continent it was 
roughly met and repressed. The successors of Charles the Great 
enacted penalties of scourging, nose-slitting, and banishment against 
voluntary unions, and even a league of the poor peasants of Gaul against 
the inroads of the Northmen was suppressed by the swords of the 
Prankish nobles. In England the attitude of the Kings was utterly 
different. The system of * frank-pledge,' or free engagement of neigh- 
bour for neighbour, was accepted after the Danish wars as the base of 
social order. Alfred recognized the common responsibility of the 
members of the ' frith-gild ' side by side with that of the kinsfolk, and 
Athelstan accepted ' frith-gilds ' as the constituent element of borough 
life in the Dooms of London. 

The frith-gild, then, in the earlier English town, was precisely similar 
to the frith-gilds which formed the basis of social order in the country 
at large. An oath of mutual fidelity among its members was substituted 
for the tie of blood, while the gild-feast, held once a month in the 
common hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk round their family 
hearth. But within this new family the aim of the frith-gild was to 
establish a mutual responsibility as close as that of the old. " Let all 
share the same lot," ran its law ; " if any misdo, let all bear it." Its 
member could look for aid from his gild-brothers in atoning for any 
guilt incurred by mishap. He could call on them for assistance in case 
of violence or wrong : if falsely accused, they appeared in court as his 
compurgators ; if poor, they supported, and when dead they buried him. 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



igi 



On the other hand, he was responsible to them, as they were to the State, 
for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against 
brother was also a wrong against the general body of the gild, and was 
punished by fine, or in the last resort by expulsion which left the 
offender a ' lawless ' man and an outcast. The one difference between 
these gilds in country and town was, that in the latter case, from their 
close local neighbourhood, they tended inevitably to coalesce. Under 
Athelstan the London gilds united into one for the purpose of carrying 
out more effectually their common aims, and at a later time we find the 
gilds of Berwick enacting " that where many bodies are found side by 
side in one place they may become one, and have one will, and in the 
dealings of one with another have a strong and hearty love." The 
process was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods 
naturally differed much in social rank, and even after the union was 
effected we see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent 
of some one or more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In 
London, for instance, the Knighten-gild, which seems to have stood at 
the head of its fellows, retained for a long time its separate property, 
while its Alderman — as the chief officer of each gild was called — 
became the Alderman of the united gild of the whole city. In 
Canterbury, we find a similar gild of Thanes, from which the chief 
officers of the town seem commonly to have been selected. Imperfect, 
however, as the union might be, when once it was effected the town 
passed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a powerful and 
organized community, whose character was inevitably determined by 
the circumstances of its origin. In their beginnings our boroughs 
seem to have been mainly gatherings of persons engaged in agricultural 
pursuits ; the first Dooms of London provide especially for the recovery 
of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing security of the 
country invited the farmer or the squire to settle apart in his own fields, 
and the growth of estate and trade told on the towns themselves, the 
difference between town and country became more sharply defined. 
London, of course, took the lead in this new development of civic life. 
Even in Athelstan's day every London merchant who had made three 
long voyages on his own account ranked as a Thane. Its *lithsmen,^ 
or shippers'-gild, were of sufficient importance under Hardicanute to 
figure in the election of a king, and its principal street still tells of the 
rapid growth of trade, in the name of ' Cheap-side,' or the bargaining 
place. But at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had 
])ecome universal. The name given to the united brotherhood is in 
idmost every case no longer that of the 'town-gild,' but of the 
'^' merchant-gild.' 

This social change in the character of the townsmen produced 
'important results in the character of their municipal institutions. 
In becoming a merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the 



Sec. iV. 



192 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



^town/ enlarged their powers of civic legislation by applying them to the 
control of their internal trade. It became their special business to obtain 
from the Crown, or from their lords, wider commercial privileges, rights 
of coinage, grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls ; while within the 
town itself they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, 
the control of markets,, and the recovery of debts. A yet more important 
result sprang from the increase of population which the growth of 
wealth and industry brought v/ith it. The mass of the new settlers, com- 
posed as they were of escaped serfs, of traders without landed holdings, 
of families who had lost their original lot in the borough, and generally 
of the artisans and the poor, had no part in the actual liife of the town. 
The right of trade and of the regulation of trade, in common with all 
other forms of jurisdiction, lay wholly in the hands of the landed 
burghers whom we have described. By a natural process, too, their 
superiority in wealth produced a fresh division between the * burghers' of 
the merchant-gild and the unenfranchised mass around them. The same 
change which severed at Florence the seven Greater Arts, or \r7^(\(^^^ 
from the fourteen Lesser Arts, and which raised the three occupations 
of banking, the manufacture and the dyeing of cloth, to a position of 
superiority even within the privileged circle of the seven, told^ though 
with less force, on the English boroughs. The burghers of the merchant- 
gild gradually concentrated themselves on the greater operations of , 
commerce, on trades which required a larger capital, while the meaner 
employments of general traffic were abandoned to their poorer neigh- 
bours. This advance in the division of labour is marked by such 
severances as we note in the thirteenth centui-y of the cloth rnerehaist 
from the tailor, or the leather merchant from the butcher. But the 
result of this severance was all-important in its influence on the consti- 
tution of our towns. The members of the trades thus abandoned by 
the wealthier burghers formed themselves into craft-gilds, which soon 
rose into dangerous rivalry with the original merchant-gild of 1 < 
A seven years' apprenticeship formed the necessary preluc' 
membership of any trade-gild. Their regulations were of the 
character ; the quality and value of work was rigidly prescr . . 
hours of toil fixed " from day-break to curfew," and strict provisior 
made against competition in labour. At each meeting of these gild? 
their members gathered round the Craft-box, which contained the 
rules of their Society, and stood with bared heads as it was opened 
The warden and a quorum of gild-brothers formed a court which 
enforced the ordinances of the gild, inspected all work done by it'- 
members, or confiscated unlawful tools or unworthy goods ; and 
obedience to their orders was punished by fines, or in the last re 
by expulsion, which involved the loss of right to trade. A comT. 
fund was raised by contributions among the members, whicl» not <: 
provided for the trade objects of the gild, but sufficed t. • ;;; 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



chantries and masses, and erect painted windows in the church of 
their patron saint. Even at the present day the arms of the craft-gild 
may often be seen blazoned in cathedrals side by side with those of 
prelates and of kings. But it was only by slow degrees that they rose 
to such eminence as this. The first steps in their existence were the 
most difficult, for to enable a trade-gild to carry out its objects with 
any success, it was necessary, first, that the whole body of craftsmen 
belonging to the trade should be compelled to belong to it, and 
secondly, that a legal control over the trade itself should be secured 
to it. A royal charter was indispensable for these purposes, and over 
the grant of these charters took place the first struggle with the 
merchant-gild, which had till then solely exercised jurisdiction over 
trade within the boroughs. The weavers, who were the first to secure 
royal sanction in the reign of Henry the First, were still engaged in the 
contest for existence as late as the reign of John, when the citizens of 
London bought for a time the suppression of their gild. Even under 
the house of Lancaster, Exeter v/as engaged in resisting the establish- 
ment of a tailor's gild. From the eleventh century, however, the 
spread of these societies went steadily on, and the control of trade 
passed from the merchant-gilds to the new craft-gilds. 

It is this struggle, to use the technical terms of the time^ of the 
" greater folk " against the "lesser folk," or of the "commune," the 
general mass of the inhabitants, against the "prudhommes," or " wiser]' 

f few, which brought about, as it passed from the regulation of trade to 
the general government of the town, the great civic revolution of the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the Continent, and especially 
along the Rhine, the struggle was as fierce as the supremacy of the 
older burghers had been complete. In Koln the craftsmen had been 
reduced to all but serfage, and the merchant of Brussels might box at 
his will the ears of " the man without heart or honour who lives by his 
toil." Such social tyranny of class over class brought a century of 
bloodshed to the cities of Germany ; but in England the tyranny of 
class over class had been restrained by the general tenor of the law, 
and the revolution took for the most part a milder form. The longest 
and bitterest strife of all was naturally at London. Nowhere had the 
territorial constitution struck root so deeply, and nowhere had the 
landed oligarchy risen to such a height of wealth and influence. The 
city v/as divided into wards, each of v/hich was governed by an alder- 

j man drawn from the ruling class. In some, indeed, the office seems to 

\ have become hereditary. The "magnates/' or "barons," of the merchant- 
gild advised alone on all matters of civic government or trade regula- 
tion, and distributed or assessed at their will the revenues or burthens 
of the town. Such a position afforded an opening for corruption and 
oppression of the most galling kind ; and it seems to have been the 

^ general impression of the unfairness of the assessment levied on the 

o 



I 



HISTORY GF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



poor, and the undue burthens which were thrown on the unenfranchised 
classes, which provoked the first serious discontent. WilKam of the 
Long Beard, himself one of the governing body, placed himself at the| 
head of a conspiracy which numbered, in the terrified fancy of the' 
burghers, fifty thousand of the craftsmen. His eloquence, his bold 
defiance of the aldermen in the town-mote, gained him at any rate a 
wide popularity, and the crowds who surrounded him hailed him as 
"the saviour of the poor." One of his addresses is luckily preserved to 
us by a hearer of the time. In medieval fashion he began with a text 
from the Vulgate, " Ye shall draw water with joy from the fountain of the 
Saviour." " I," he began, " am the saviour of the poor. Ye poor men 
who have felt the weight of rich men's hands, draw from my fountain 
waters of wholesome instruction and that with joy, for the time of your 
visitation is at hand. For I will divide the v/aters from the waters. It 
is the people who are the waters, and I will divide the lowly and faithful 
folk from the proud and faithless folk ; I will part the chosen from the > 
reprobate as light from darkness." But it was in vain that by appeals ' 
to the King he strove to win royal favour for the popular cause. The 
support of the moneyed classes v/as essential to Richard in the costly 
wars with Philip of France, and the Justiciary, Archbishop Hubert, J | 
after a moment of hesitation, issued orders for his arrest. William! i 
seized an axe and felled the first soldier who advanced to seize him, 
and taking refuge with a fev/ adherents in the tower of Saint Mary-le- 
Bow, summoned his adherents to rise. Hubert, however, who had 
already flooded the city with troops, with bold contempt of the right of 
sanctuary set fire to the tower and forced William to surrender. A 
burgher's son, whose father he had slain, stabbed him as he came forth, 
and with his death the quarrel slumbered for more than fifty years. 

No further movement, in fact, took place till the outbreak of the 
Barons' wars, but the city had all through the interval been seething 
with discontent ; the unenfranchised craftsmen, under pretext of preser- 
ving the peace, had united in secret frith-gilds of their own, and mobs 
rose from time to time to sack the houses of foreigners and the wealthier 
burghers. But it was not till the civil war began that the open contest 
recommenced. The craftsmen forced their way into the town-mote, and 
setting aside the aldermen and magnates, chose Thomas-fitz-Thomas 
for their mayor. Although dissension still raged during the reign of 
the second Edward, we miay regard this election as marking the final 
victory of the craft-gilds. Under his successor all contest seems to 
have ceased : charters had been granted to every trade, their ordinances 
formally recognized and enrolled in the mayoi-'s court, and distinctive 
liveries assumed to which they owed the name of " Livery Companies," 
which they still retain. The wealthier citizens, who found their old 
power broken, regained influence by enrolling themselves as members 
of the trade-gilds, and Edward the Third himself humoured the 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



icjS 



current of civic feeling by becoming a member of the gild of Armour- 
ers. This event marks the time when the government of our towns 
had become more really popular than it ever again became till the 
Municipal Reform Act of our own days. It had passed from the 
hands of an oligarchy into those of the middle classes, and there was 
nothing as yet to foretell the reactionary revolution by which the 
trade-gilds themselves became an oligarchy as narrow as that which 
they had deposed. 



Section V.— The King and the Baronage^ 1290— 1327. 

[Authorities. — For Edward I. as before. For Edward II. we have three 
important contemporaries : on the King's side, Thomas de la Moor (in Camden, 
**AngIica, Brittanica, etc."); on that of the Barons, Trokelovi^e's Annals 
(pubHshed by the Master of the Rolls), and the Life by a monk of Malmes- 
bury, printed by Hearne. The short Chronicle by Murimuth is also contem- 
porary in date. Hallam (** Middle Ages") has illustrated the constitutional 
aspect of the time.] 

If we turn again to the constitutional history of England from the 
accession of Edward the First we find a progress not less real but 
chequered with darker vicissitudes than the progress of our towns. 
Able as Edward undoubtedly was, he failed utterly to recognize the 
great transfer of power which had been brought about by the long 
struggle for the Charter, by che reforms of Earl Simon, and by his own 
earlier legislation. His conception of kingship was that of a just and 
religious Henry the Second, but his England was as different from the 
England of Henry as the Parliament of the one was different from 
the Great Council of the other. In the rough rimes of Robert of 
Gloucester we read the simple political creed of the people at large. 

*' When the land through God's grace to good peace was brought 
For to have the old laws the high men turned their thought : 
For to have, as we said erst, the good old Law, 
The King made his charter and granted it with sawe." 

But the power which the Charter had wrested from the Crown fell not 
to the people but to the Baronage. The farmer and the artisan, though 
they could fight in some great crisis for freedom, had as yet no wish to 
interfere in the common task of government. The vast industrial 
change in both town and country, which had begun during the reign of 
Henry the Third, and which continued with increasing force during 
that of his son, absorbed the energy and attention of the trading 
classes. In agriculture, the inclosure of common lands and the intro- 
duction of the system of leases on the part of the great proprietors, 
coupled with the subdivision of estates which was facilitated by 

O 2 



Sec. V. 
The King 

AND THE 
BaRONAGBt 

1290* 
1327, 



England 

under 
Edi^/ardl 



!96 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 



and its 
rule. 



Edward's legislation, was gradually creating out of the masses of rural 
bondsmen a new class of tenant farmers, whose whole energy was 
absorbed in their own great rise to social freedom. The very causes 
which rendered the growth of municipal liberty so difficult, increased 
the wealth of the towns. To the trade with Norway and the Hanse 
towns of North Germany, the wool- trade with Flanders, and the wine 
trade with Gas cony, was now added a fast increasing commerce with 
Italy and Spain. The great Venetian merchant galleys appeared on 
the English coast, Florentine traders settled in the southern ports, 
the bankers of Lucca followed those of Cahors, who had already dealt 
a death-blow to the usury of the Jews. But the wealth and industrial 
energy of the country was shown, not only in the rise of a capitalist 
class, but in a crowd of civil and ecclesiastical buildings which dis- 
tinguished this period. Christian architecture reached its highest beauty 
in the opening of Edward's reign, a period marked by the completion of 
the abbey church of Westminster and the exquisite cathedral church 
at Salisbury. The noble of the day was proud to be styled " an 
incomparable builder," while some traces of the art of Italy, which was 
just springing into life, flowed in with the Italian ecclesiastics whom 
the Papacy was forcing on the English Church. In the abbey of i\ 
Westminster the shrine of the Confessor, the mosaic pavement, and the ^ | 
paintings on the walls of minster and chapter-house, remind us of 
the school which was about to spring up under Giotto. 

But even had this industrial distraction been wanting the trading li 

classes had no mind to claim any direct part in the actual work of ! 

government. It was a work which , in default of the Crown, fell naturally, 

according to the ideas of the time, to the Baronage, and in the 

Baronage the nation reposed an unwavering trust. The nobles of 

England were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the 

strong hand of the Norman sovereign had been needed to protect their 

subjects ; they were as English as the peasant or the trader. They had 

won English liberty by their swords, and the popular trust in their 

I fidelity to its cause was justified by the tradition of their order, which 

i bound them to look on themselves as its natural guardians. Quietly, 

' therefore, and by a natural process of political development, the 

: problem which Earl Simon had first dared to face, how to ensure the 

i government of the realm in accordance with the Charter, was solved 

\ as Simon had solved it, by the transfer of the business of administra- 

I tion into the hands of a standing committee of the greater prelates 

and barons, acting as the chief officers of state under the name of the 

Continual Council. The quiet government of the kingdom by this body 

in the interval between the death of Henry the Third and the return 

of Edward the First, if we contrast it with the disorders which had 

previously followed a king's decease, proves that the Crown was no 

longer the real depositary of political power. In the brief indeed 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



197 



which announced Edward's accession the Council asserted the crown 
to have devolved on the new monarch " by the will of the peers." At 
an earlier time the personal greatness of Edward might have redressed 
the balance, but the character of his legislation, as we have traced it in 
a former page, and especially the oligarchical character of his land 
la.ws shows the influence of the Baronage to have remained practically 
supreme. The very form indeed of the new Parliament, in which the 
barons were backed by the knights of the shire, elected for the most 
part under their influence, and by the representatives of the towns, still 
true to the traditions of the Barons' war ; the increased frequency of 
these Parliamentary assemblies which gave opportunity for counsel, for 
party organization, and a distinct political base of action ; above all, the 
new financial power which their control over taxation enabled them to 
exert on the throne, placed the rule of the nobles on a basis too strong 
to be shaken by the utmost efforts of even Edward himself. 

From the very outset of his reign the King struggled fruitlessly 
against this overpowering influence. He was the last man to be 
content with a crown held " at the will of the peers," and his sympathies 
must have been stirred by the revolution on the other side the Channel^ 
where the successors of St. Lewis were crushing the power of the 
feudal Baronage and erecting a royal despotism on its ruins. He at 
once copied the French monarchs by issuing writs of " quo warranto," 
which required every noble to produce his titles to his estates. But 
the attack was roughly met. Earl Warrenne bared a rusty sword, and 
flung it on the commissioners' table. " This, sirs," said he, " is my 
title-deed. By the sword my fathers won their lands when they came 
over with the Conqueror, and by my sword I will hold them." The 
King dealt a harder blow at the Baronage in his rigorous enforcement 
of public order. Different as the English nobles were from the feudal 
noblesse of Germany and France, there is in every military class a 
tendency to outrage and violence, which even the stern justice of 
Edward found it difficult to repress. Great earls, such as those of 
Gloucester and Hereford, carried on private war along the Welsh 
marches ; in Shropshire, the Earl of Arundel waged his feud with Fulk 
Fitz Warine. To the lesser nobles the wealth of the trader, the long 
wain of goods as it passed along the highway, was a tempting prey. 
Once, under cover of a mock tournament of monks against canons^ a 
band of country gentlemen succeeded in introducing themselves into the 
great merchant fair at Boston ; at nightfall every booth was on fire, the 
merchants robbed and slaughtered, and the booty carried off to ships 
which lay ready at the quay. Streams of gold and silver, ran the tale 
of popular horror, flowed melted down the gutters to the sea ; " all the 
money in England could hardly make good the loss." At the close of 
Edward's reign lawless bands of " trail-bastons," or club-men, main- 
tained them^selves by general outrage, aided the country nobles in their 



198 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



feuds, and wrested money and goods b)^ threats from the great trades- 
men. The King was strong enough to fine and imprison the Earls, to 
hang the chief of the Boston marauders, and to suppress the out- 
laws by rigorous commissions. But he had struck from his hands, 
by two widely different measures, his chief resources for a struggle 
with the Barons when the Scotch war suddenly placed him at their 
mercy. 

It was by the support of the lawyer class, by its hatred of the 
noblesse, by its introduction of the civil law and the doctrine of a 
royal despotism, that the French Kings had trampled feudalism under 
foot. In England so perfect was the national union, that the very 
judges were themselves necessarily drawn from the body of the lesser 
Baronage. It was probably their uselessness for any purposes of royal 
aggression, quite as much as their personal corruption, which Edward 
suddenly punished by a clean sweep of the bench. The Chief 
Justiciary was banished from the realm, and his colleagues imprisoned 
and fined. While his justice thus robbed him of the weapon of the 
law, fanaticism robbed him of the financial resource which had so often 
enabled his predecessors to confront their people. Under the Ange- 
vins the popular hatred of the Jews had grown rapidly in intensity. 
But the royal protection had never wavered. Henry the Second had 
granted them the right of burial outside of every city where they dwelt. 
Richard had punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and 
he organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration 
of their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself^ 
though he once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of 
his realm. But the very troubles of the time brought in a harvest 
greater than even the royal greed could reap ; the Jews grew wealthy 
enough to acquire estates, and only a burst of popular feeling prevented 
a legal decision which would have enabled them to own freeholds, and \ 
rise to an equal citizenship with their Christian neighbours. Their 
pride and contempt of the superstitions around them broke out in the 
taunts they levelled at processions as they passed their Jewries, some- 
times as at Oxford in actual attacks upon them. Wild stories floated 
about among the people of children carried off to Jewish houses, to be 
circumcised and crucified, and a boy of Lincoln who was found slain 
in a Jewish house was canonized by popular reverence as " S. Hugh." 
Fanaticism met fanaticism, and the first work of the Friars was to 
settle in the Hebrew quarters and establish their convent-houses. 
But the tide of popular fury was rising too fast for these gentler means 
of reconciliation. When the Franciscans saved seventy Jews from 
death by their prayers to the King the populace angrily refused the 
brethren alms. The sack of Jewry after Jewry was the sign of popular 
triumph during the Barons' war. With its close, fell on the Jews the 
more terrible persecution 0% the law. Statute after statute hemmed 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



199 



them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ, ' 
Christian servants, to move through the streets without the coloured ! 
tablet of wool on their breast which distinguished their race. They 
were prohibited from building new synagogues, or eating with Chris- 
tians, or acting as physicians to them. Their tradCj already crippled by 
the rivalry of the bankers of Cahors, was annihilated by a royal order, 
v/hich bade them renounce usury under pain of death. At last perse- 
cution could do no more, and on the eve of his struggle with Scotland, 
Edward, eager for popular favour, and himself sv/ayed by the fanaticism 
of his subjects, ended the long agony of the Jews by their expulsion 
from the realm. Of the sixteen thousand who preferred exile to 
apostasy few reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked 
others robbed and flung overboard. One ship-master turned out a 
crew of wealthy merchants on to a sandbank, and bade them call a 
new Moses to save them from the sea. From the time of Edward to 
that of Cromwell no Jew touched English ground. 

No share in the enormities which accompanied the expulsion of the 
Jews can fall upon Edward, for he not only suffered the fugitives to 
take their wealth with them, but punished v/ith the halter those who 
plundered them at sea. But the expulsion was none the less a crime, 
and a crime for which punishment was quick to follow. The grant of a 
fifteenth made by the grateful Parliament proved but a poor substitute 
for the loss which the royal treasury had sustained. The demands of 
the Scotch war grew heavier day by day, and they were soon aggravated 
by the yet greater expenses of the French war which it entailed. It 
was sheer want which drove Edward to tyrannous extortion. His first 
blow fell on the Church ; he demanded half their annual income from 
the clergy, and so terrible was his wrath at their resistance, that the 
Dean of S. PauFs, who had stood forth to remonstrate, dropped dead 
of sheer terror at his feet. " If any oppose the King's demand," said a 
royal envoy, in the midst of the Convocation, "let him stand up that 
he may be noted as an enemy to the King's peace." The outraged 
churchmen fell back on an untenable plea that their aid was due solely to 
Rome, and pleaded a bull of exemption, granted by Pope Boniface 
VI 1 1., as a ground for refusing to comply with further taxation. 
Edward met their refusal by a general outlawry of the whole order. 
The King's courts were closed, and all justice denied to those who 
refused the King aid. The clergy had, in fact, put themselves in the 
wrong, and the outlawry soon forced them to submission, but their 
aid did little to recruit the exhausted treasury, while the pressure of the 
war steadily increased. Far wader measures of arbitrary taxation were 
needful to equip an expedition which Edward prepared to lead in 
person to Flanders. The country gentlemen were compelled to take 
up knighthood, or to compound for exemption from the burthensome 
honour. Forced contributions of cattle and corn were demanded from 



Sec. V. 
The King 



200 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The 

Lords 

Ordain- 

ers. 



the counties, and the export duty on wool — now the staple produce of 

the country — was raised to six times its former amount. The work of 

the Great Charter and the Barons' war seemed suddenly to have been 

undone, but the blow had no sooner been struck than Edward found 

himself powerless within his realm. The Baronage roused itself to 

resistance, and the two greatest of the English nobles, Bohun, Earl of 

Hereford, and Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, placed themselves at the head 

of the opposition. Their feudal tenures did not bind them to foreign 

service, and their protest against the war and the financial measures by 

which it was carried on, took the practical form of a refusal to follow 

Edward to Flanders. " By God, Sir Earl," swore the King to Bohun, 

" you shall either go or hang ! " " By God, Sir King," was the cool 

reply, " I will neither go nor hang ! " Ere the Parliament he had 

convened could meet, Edward had discovered his own powerlessness, 

and, with one of those sudden revulsions of feeling of w^hich his 

nature was capable, he stood before his people in Westminster Hall 

and owned, with a burst of tears, that he had taken their substance 

without due warrant of law. His passionate appeal to their loyalty 

wrested a reluctant assent to the prosecution of the war, but the crisis 

had taught the need of further securities against the royal power, 

and while Edward was still struggling in Flanders the Church and the 

Baronage drew together in their old alliance. The Primate, Win- 

chelsey, joined the two Earls and the citizens of London in forbidding 

any further levy of supplies, and in summoning a new Parliament, in 

which the Charter was not only confirmed but new articles were added 

to it, prohibiting the King from raising taxes save by general consent 

of the realm. Edward hurried back from Flanders, but his struggles 

to evade a public ratification of the Charter, his attempt to add an 

evasive clause saving the right of the Crown, and the secret brief 

which he procured from the Papacy annulling the statute altogether, 

only proved the bitterness of his humiliation. A direct threat of 

rebellion forced him to swear compliance with its provisions, and four 

years later a fresh gathering of the Barons in arms wrested from him 

the full execution of the Charter of Forests. The successes gained 

over Scotland at the close of Edward's reign seemed for a moment 

to restore vigour to the royal authority ; but the fatal struggle revived 

in the rising of Robert Bruce, and the King's death bequeathed the 

contest to his worthless son. 

Worthless, however, as Edward the Second morally might be, he 
was far from being destitute of the intellectual power which seemed 
hereditary in the Plantagenets. It was his settled purpose to fling off 
the yoke of the Baronage, and the means by which he designed 
accomplishing his purpose was a Ministry wholly dependent on the 
Crown. We have already noticed the change by which the " clerks of 
the king's chapel," who had been the ministers of arbitrary government 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



under the Normans and Angevins, had been quietly superseded by 

the prelates and lords of the Continual Council. At the close of his 

father's reign, a direct demand on the part of the Barons to nominate 

the great officers of state had been curtly rejected ; but the royal choice 

had been practically limited in the selection of its ministers to the 

class of prelates and nobles, and, however closely connected with 

royalty, such officers always to a great extent shared the feelings and 

opinions of their order. It was the aim of the young King to undo 

the change which had been silently brought about, and to imitate the 

policy of the contemporary sovereigns of France by choosing as his 

ministers men of an inferior position, wholly dependent on the Crown 

for their power, and representatives of nothing but the policy and 

interests of their master. Piers Gaveston, a foreigner sprung from a 

family of Guienne, had been his friend and companion during his 

father's reign, at the close of which he had been banished from the 

realm for his share in intrigues which had divided Edward from his 

son. At the opening of the new reign he was at once recalled, created 

Earl of Cornwall, and placed at the head of the administration. Gay, 

genial, thriftless, Gaveston showed in his first acts the quickness and 

audacity of Southern Gaul ; the older ministers were dismissed, all 

claims of precedence or inheritance set aside in the distribution of 

offices at the coronation, while taunts and defiances goaded the proud 

Baronage to fury. The favourite was a fine soldier, and his lance 

unhorsed his opponents in tourney after tourney. His reckless wit 

flung nicknames about the Court, the Earl of Lancaster was "the 

Actor," Pembroke "the Jew," Warwick '^the Black Dog." But taunt 

and defiance broke helplessly against the iron m^ass of the Baronage. 

After a few months of power the formal demand of the Parliament for 

his dismissal could not be resisted, and his exile was followed by the 

refusal of a grant of supply till redress had been granted for the 

grievances of which the Commons complained. The great principle 

on which the whole of our constitutional history really hangs, that the 

redress of grievances* should precede the grant of aid to the Crown, 

was established by Edward's reluctant assent to the demand of the 

Parliament, and the great concession purchased Gaveston's return. 

His policy, however, w^as the same as before, and in a few months the 

Barons were again in arms. The administrative revolution of the 

King was met b}^ the revival of the bold measures of Earl Simon, and 

the appointment in full Parliament of a standing Committee of bishops, 

earls, and barons, for the government of the realm during the coming 

1 year. A formidable list of " Articles of Reform " drawn up by these 

^^ Lords Ordainers " met Edward on his return from a fruitless warfare 

with the Scots, the most important of which related to the constitution 

of the executive power. Parhaments were to be holden at least once 

{ a year ; the consent of the Baronage assembled in them was required 

\ 



The King 

.4ND THE 

Baronage. 
1290- 
1327. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap» 



for a declaration of war or the King's departure from the realm, for 
the choice of all the great officers of the Crown and of the wardens of 
the royal castles, while that of the sheriffs was left to the Continual 
Council whom they nominated. The demand was in fact one for a 
transfer of the King's authority into the hands of the Baronage, for the 
part of the Commons in Parliament was still confined to the presenta- 
tion of petitions of grievances and the grant of money, and it was 
only after a long and obstinate struggle that Edward was forced to 
comply. The exile of Gaveston was the sign of the Barons' triumph ; 
his return a few months later renewed a strife which was only ended 
by his capture in Scarborough. The "Black Dog" of Warwick had 
sworn that the favourite should feel his teeth ; and Gaveston, who 
flung himself in vain at the feet of the Earl of Lancaster, praying for 
pity " from his gentle lord," was beheaded in defiance of the terms of 
his capitulation on Blacklow Hill. The King^s burst of grief was as 
fruitless as his threats of vengeance ; a feigned submission of the con- 
querors completed the royal humiliation, and the Barons knelt before 
Edward in Westminster Hall to receive a pardon which seemed the 
deathblow of the royal power. But if Edward was powerless to con- 
quer the Baronage he could still, by evading the observances of the 
Ordinances, throw the whole realm into confusion. The six years that 
follow Gaveston's death are among the darkest in our history. A, 
horrible succession of famines intensified the suffering which sprang! 
from whe utter absence of all rule during the dissension between the* 
Barons and the King. The overthrow of Bannockburn, and the 
ravages of the Scots in the North, brought shame on England such as 
it had never known. At last the capture of Berwick by Robert Bruce 
forced Edward partially to give way, the Ordinances were formally 
accepted, an amnesty granted, and a small number of peers belonging 
to the Barons' party added to the great officers of state. 

The character of the Earl of Lancaster, who, by the union of the 
four earldoms of Lincoln, Leicester, Salisbury, and Derby with his 
own, as well as by his royal blood (for like the King he was a grandson 
of Henry the Third), stood at the head of the English baronage, and 
whom the issue of the long struggle with Edward raised for the 
moment to supreme power in the realm, seems to have fallen far 
beneath the greatness of his position. Incapable of governing, he 
could do little but regard with jealousy the new favourite, originally 
one of his own dependants, whom Edward adopted. The rise of Hugh 
Le Despenser, on whom the King bestowed the county of Glamorgan 
with the hand of its heiress, was rapid enough to excite general 
jealousy, and Lancaster found little difHculty in extorting by force of 
arms his exile from the kingdom. But the tide of popular sympathy, 
already wavering, was turned to the royal cause by an insult offered 
to the Queen, against whom Lady Badlesmere had closed the doors? 



iv.i 



THE THREE EDWARDS 



203 



of her castle of Ledes, and the unexpected energy shown by Edward i 
in avenging the insult gave fresh strength to his cause. He found 
himself strong enough to recall Despenser, and when Lancaster con- 
voked the Baronage to force him again into exile^ the weakness of 
his party was shown by the treasonable negotiations into which he 
entered with the Scots, and by his precipitate retreat to the North on 
the advance of the royal army. At Boroughbridge however his forces 
were arrested and dispersed, and the Earl himself, brought captive 
before Edward at Pontefract, was ordered instantly to death as a j 
traitor. " Have mercy on m.e, King of Heaven," cried Lancaster, as 
mounted on a grey pony without a bridle he was hurried to execution, 
"for my earthly King has forsaken me." His death was followed by 
that of a crowd of his adherents and by the captivity of the rest ; while 
a Parliament at York annulled the proceedings against Despenser, 
and repealed the greater part of the Ordinances. It is to this Parlia- 
ment however, and perhaps to the victorious confidence of the royalists, 
that we owe the famous provision that all laws concerning " the estate 
of the Crown or of the realm and people must be treated, accorded, 
and established in Parliament by the King, by and with the consent of 
the prelates, earls, barons, and universality of the realm." There can 
be little doubt from the tenor of this remarkable enactment that much 
of the sudden revulsion of popular feeling had been owing to the 
assumption of all legislative action by the Baronage alone. But the 
arrogance of Despenser, the utter failure of a fresh campaign against 
Scotland, and the humiliating truce for fourteen years which Edward 
was forced to conclude with Robert Bruce, soon robbed the Crown 
of its temporary popularity, while Edward's domestic vices brought 
about the sudden catastrophe which closed his disastrous reign. It 
had been arranged that the Queen, a sister of the King of France, 
should revisit her home to conclude a treaty between the two king- 
doms, whose quarrel was again verging upon war, and his son, a boy 
of twelve years old, follov/ed her to do homage in his father's stead for 
the duchy of Guienne. Neither threats nor prayers, however, could 
induce either wife or child to return, and the Queen's connection with 
the secret conspiracy of the Baronage was revealed when the primate 
and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at Orwell. Deserted 
by all and repulsed by the citizens of London, whose aid he had im- 
plored, the King fled hastily to the Marches of Wales and embarked 
with his favourite for Lundy Isle, but contrary winds flung the fugitives 
again on the Welsh coast, where they fell into the hands of the new 
Earl of Lancaster. Despenser was at once hung on a gibbet fifty feet 
high, and the King placed in ward at Kenilworth till his fate could be 
decided by a Parliament summoned for that purpose at Westminster. 
The peers assembled fearlessly revived the constitutional usage of the 
earlier English freedom, and asserted their right to depose a king 



Sec. V. 
The King 

AND THE 

Baronage. 
12@0- 

1327. 



204 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Char 



who had proved himself unworthy to rule. Not a voice v/as raised in 
Edward's behalf, and only four prelates protested when the young 
Prince was proclaimed King by acclamation, and presented as their 
sovereign to the multitudes without. The revolution soon took legal 
form in a bill which charged the captive monarch with indolence? 
incapacity, the loss of Scotland, the violation of his coronation oath, 
and oppression of the Church and Baronage ; and on the approval of 
this it was resolved that the reign of Edward of Caernarvon had 
ceased and that the crown had passed to his son, Edward of Windsor. 
A deputation of the Parliament proceeded to Kenilworth to procure 
the assent of the discrowned King to his own deposition, and Edward, 
^' clad in a plain black gown," submitted quietly to his fate. Sir William 
Trussel at once addressed him in words which better than any other 
mark the true nature of the step which the Parliament had taken. " I, 
William Trussel, proctor of the earls, barons, and others, having for 
this full and sufficient power, do render and give back to you, Edward, ■ 
once King of England, the homage and fealty of the persons named in I 
my procuracy ; and acquit and discharge them thereof in the best 
manner that law and custom will give. And I now make protestation 
in their name that they will no longer be in your fealty and allegiance, 
nor claim to hold anything of you as king, but will account you here- 
after as a private person, without any manner of royal dignity." A 
significant act followed these emphatic words. Sir Francis Blount, 
the steward of the household, broke his staff of office, a ceremony only 
used at a king's death, and declared that all persons engaged in the 
royal service were discharged. 

Section VI.— The Scotch War of Independence, 130S— 134.2. 

[Authorities. — Mainly the contemporary English Chroniclers and state-docu- 
ments for the reigns of the three Edwards. '^The Bruce" of John Barbour 
is the great legendary storehouse for the adventures of his hero : but its his- 
torical value may be measured by the fact that though born less than twenty 
years after the King's death he makes Bruce identical with his own grand- 
father. Mr. Burton's is throughout the best modern account of the time.] 



To obtain a clear view of the constitutional struggle between the 
kings and their baronage, we have deferred to its close an account of 
the great contest which raged throughout the whole period in the 
North. 

With the Convention of Perth the conquest and settlement of Scotland 
seemed complete. Edward, in fact, was preparing for a joint Parliament 
of the two nations at Carlisle, v/hen the conquered country suddenly 
sprung again to arms under Robert Bruce, the grandson of one of the 
original claimants of the crown. The Norman house of Bruce formed ■ 
a part of the Yorkshire baronage, but it had acquired through inter- 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



marriages the Earldom of Carrick and the Lordship of Annandale. 
Both the claimant and his son had been pretty steadily on the English 
side in the contest with Balhol and Wallace, and Robert had himself 
been trained in the Enghsh Court, and stood high in the King's favour. 
But the withdrawal of Balhol gave a new force to his claims upon the 
crown, and the discovery of an intrigue which he had set on foot with 
the Bishop of St. Andrews so roused Edward's jealousy that Bruce 
fled for his life across the border. In the church of the Grey Friars 
at Dumfries he met Comyn, the Lord of Badenoch, to whose treachery 
he attributed the disclosure of his plans, and after the interchange 
of a few hot words struck him with his dagger to the ground. It was 
an outrage that admitted of no forgiveness, and Bruce for very safety 
was forced to assume the crown six weeks after in the Abbey of Scone. 
The news roused Scotland again to arms, and summoned Edward to a 
fresh contest with his unconquerable foe. But the murder of Comyn 
had changed the King's mood to a terrible pitilessness ; he threatened 
death against all concerned in the outrage, and exposed the Countess 
of Buchan, who had set the crown on Bruce's head, in a cage or open 
chamber built for the purpose in one of the towers of Berwick. At 
the solemn feast which celebrated his son's knighthood Edward vowed 
on the swan, which formed the chief dish at the banquet, to devote 
the rest of his days to exact vengeance from the murderer himself. ' 
But even at the moment of the vow, Bruce was already flying for his ! 
life to the Highlands. " Henceforth," he had said to his wife at their 
coronation, " thou art queen of Scotland and I king." " I fear," replied ' 
Mary Bruce, "we are only playing at royalty, like children in their 
games." The play was soon turned into bitter earnest. A small 
English force under Aymer de Valence sufficed to rout the disorderly 
levies which gathered round the new monarch, and the flight of Bruce 
left his follow^ers at Edward's mercy. Noble after noble was hurried 
to the block. The Earl of Athole pleaded kindred with royalty ; " His 
only privilege," burst forth the King, "shall be that of being hanged 
on a higher gallows than the rest." Knights and priests were strung 
up side by side by the English justiciaries ; while the wife and daugh- 
ters of Robert himself were flung into Edward's prisons. Bruce him- 
self had offered to capitulate to Prince Edward, but the offer only 
roused the old King to fury. " Who is so bold," he cried, " as to treat 
with our traitors without our knowledge .^" and rising from his sick-bed 
he led his army northwards to complete the conquest. But the hand 
of death was upon him, and in the very sight of Scotland the old man 
breathed his last at Burgh-upon- Sands. 

The abandonment of his great enterprise by Edward the Second, 
and the troubles which soon arose between the King and the English 
barons, were far at first from restoring the fortunes of Robert Bruce. 
The Earl of Pembroke was still master of the open country, and the 



The Scotch 
War o? 
Indepen- 
dence. 
13C6- 
1342. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Highland chiefs of the West, amongst whom the new king was driven 
to seek for shelter, were bitterly hostile to the sovereign of the Low- 
land Scots. For four years Bruce's career was that of a desperate 
adventurer ; but it was adversity which transformed the reckless mur- 
derer of Comyn into the noble leader of a nation's cause. Strong and 
of commanding presence, brave and genial in temper, Bruce bore the 
hardships of his career with a courage and hopefulness which never 
failed. In the legends which clustered round his name we see him 
listening in Highland glens to the bay of the bloodhounds on his 
track, or holding single-handed a pass against a crowd of savage 
clansmen. Sometimes the little band of fugitives were forced to 
support themselves by hunting or fishing, sometimes to break up for 
safety as their enemies tracked them to their lair. Bruce himself had 
more than once to fling off his shirt of mail and scramble barefoot 
for his very life up the crags. Little by little, however, the dark 
sky cleared. The English pressure relaxed as the struggle between 
Edward and his barons grew fiercer. James Douglas, the darling of 
Scotch story, was the first of the Lowland barons to rally again to the 
Bruce, and his daring gave heart to the royal cause. Once he surprised 
his own house, which had been given to an Englishman, ate the dinner 
which had been prepared for its new owner, slew his captives, and 
tossed their bodies on to a pile of wood gathered at the castle gate. 
Then ke staved in the wine-vats that the wine might mingle with their 
blood, and set house and woodpile on fire. A terrible ferocity mingled 
with heroism in the work of freedom, but the work went steadily on. 
Bruce's "harrying of Buchan" after his defeat of its Earl, who had 
joined the English in the North, at last fairly turned the tide of 
success. Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Perth, and most of the Scotch fortresses 
fell one by one into the King's hands. The clergy met in council and 
owned Bruce as their lawful lord. Gradually the Scotch barons who 
still held to the English cause were coerced into submission, and 
Bruce found himself strong enough to invest Stirling, the last and the 
most important of the Scotch fortresses which held out for Edward. 

Stirling was in fact the key of Scotland, and its danger roused 
England out of its civil strife to a vast effort for the recovery of its 
prey. Thirty thousand horsemen formed the fighting part of the 
great army v/hich followed Edward to the North, and a host of wild 
marauders had been summoned from Ireland and Wales to its support. 
The army which Bruce had gathered to oppose the inroad was formed 
almost wholly of footmen, and was stationed to the south of Stirling 
on a rising ground flanked by a little brook, the Bannock burn which 
gave its name to the engagement. Again the two systems of warfare, 
the feudal and the free, were brought face to face, as they had been 
brought at Falkirk, and the King, like Wallace, drew up his force in 
solid squares or circles of spearmen. The English were dispirited at 



IV. J 



THE THREE EDWARDS, 



the very outset by the failure of an attempt to reheve Stirling, and by 
the issue of a single combat between Bruce and Henry de Bohun, a 
knight who had borne down upon him as he was riding peacefully 
along the front of his army. Robert was mounted on a small hackney 
and held only a light battle-axe in his hand, but, warding off his 
opponent's spear, he cleft his skull with so terrible a blow that the' 
handle of the axe was shattered in his grasp. At the opening of the 
battle the English archers were thrown forward to rake the Scottish 
squares, but they were without support and were easily dispersed by a 
handful of horse whom Bruce had held in reserve for the purpose. 
The great body of men-at-arm.s next flung themselves on the Scottish 
front, but their charge was embarrassed by the narrow space along 
which the line was forced to move, and the steady resistance of the 
squares soon threw the knighthood into disorder. " The horses that 
were stickit," says an exulting Scotch writer, "rushed and reeled 
right rudely." In the moment of failure the sight of a body of camp- 
followers, whom they mistook for reinforcements to the enemy, spread 
panic through the English host. It broke in a headlong rout. The 
thousands of brilliant horsemen were soon floundering in pits which 
had guarded the level ground to Bruce's left, or riding in wild haste 
for the border. Few however were fortunate enough to reach it. 
Edward himself, with a body of five hundred knights, succeeded in 
escaping to Dunbar and the sea. But the flower of his knighthood fell 
into the hands of the victors, v/hile the Irishry and the footmen were 
ruthlessly cut down by the country folk as they fled. For centuries 
after, the rich plunder of the English camp left its traces on the 
treasure and vestment rolls of castle and abbey. 

Terrible as was the blow it v/as long before England could relinquish 
her claim on the Scottish crown. With equal pertinacity Bruce refused 
all negotiation while the royal title was refused to him, and steadily 
pushed on the recovery of the South. Berwick was at last forced to 
surrender, and held against a desperate attempt at its recapture ; while 
barbarous forays of the borderers under Douglas wasted Northumber- 
land. Again the strife between the Crown and the Baronage was 
suspended to allow the march of a great English army to the North, 
but Bruce declined an engagement till the wasted Lowlands starved 
the invaders into a ruinous retreat. The blow wrested from England 
a trace for thirteen years, in the negotiation of which Bruce was suffered 
to take the royal title, but the deposition of Edward II. gave a fresh 
impulse to the ambition of the English baronage, and Edward Balliol, 
the son of the former King, was solemmly received at the English 
Court. Robert was now on his death-bed, but the insult roused him 
to hurl his marauders again over the border under Douglas and Ran- 
dolph. Froissart paints for us the Scotch army as he saw it in this 
memorable campaign, " It consisted of four thousand men-at-arms 



Sec. VI. 

The Scotch 
War of 
Indepen- 
dence. 
i306- 
1342. 



The Iude> 
pendence 

of 
Scotland. 



208 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



knights and esquires, well mounted, besides twenty thousand men bold 
and hardy, armed after the manner of their country, and maunted upon 
little hackneys that are never tied up or dressed, but turned im.me- 
diately after the day's march to pasture on the heath or in the fields. 
. . . . They bring no carriages with them on account of the mountains 
they have to pass in Northumberland, neither do they carry with them 
any provisions of bread or wine, for their habits of sobriety are such 
in timie of war that they will live for a long time on flesh half-sodden 
without bread, and drink the river water without wine. They have 
therefore no occasion for pots or pans, for they dress the flesh of the 
cattle in their skins after they have flayed them, and being sure to find 
plenty of them in the country which they invade, they carry none with 
them. Under the flaps of his saddle each man carries a broad piece 
of metal, behind him a little bag of oatmeal : when they have eaten 
too much of the sodden flesh and their stomach appears weak and 
empty, they set this plate over the fire, knead the meal with water, and 
when the plate is hot put a little of the paste upon it and a thin cake 
like a biscuit which they eat to warm their stomachs. It is therefore 
no wonder that they perform a longer day's march than other soldiers." 
Against such a foe the heavy-armed knighthood of the English army, ^ 
which marched under its boy-king to protect the border, was utterly 
helpless. At one time the army lost its way in the vast border waste ; 
at another all traces of the enemy had disappeared, and an offer of 
knighthood and a hundred marks was made to any who could tell 
where the Scotch were encamped. But when found their position 
behind the Wear proved unassailable, and after a bold sally on the 
English camp Douglas foiled an attempt at blockading him by a clever 
retreat. The English levies broke hopelessly up, and a fresh foray on 
Northumberland forced the English Court to submit to peace. By 
the Treaty of Northampton the independence of Scotland was formally 
recognized, and Bruce acknowledged as its king. 

The pride of England, however, had been too much aroused by the 
struggle to bear easily its defeat. The first result of the treaty was 
the overthrow of the Government which concluded it, a result hastened 
by the pride of its head, Roger Mortimer, and by his exclusion of the 
rest of the nobles from all share in the administration of the realm. 
The first efforts of the Baronage were unsuccessful : the Earl of 
Lancaster, who had risen in revolt, was forced to submission; and 
the King's uncle, the Earl of Kent, was actually brought to the block, 
before the young King himself interfered in the struggle. Entering 
the Council chamber in Nottingham Castle, with a force which 
he had introduced through a secret passage in the^ rock on which 
it stands, Edward arrested Mortimer with his own hands, hurried 
him to execution, and assumed the control of affairs. His first 
care was to restore good order throughout the country, which under 



IV.] 



THE THREE EDWARDS. 



209 



the late Government had fallen into ruin, and to free his hands 
by a peace with France for the troubles which Avere again impend- 
ing in the north. Fortune, indeed, seemed at last to have veered to 
the English side ; the death of Bruce only a year after the Treaty 
of Northampton left the Scottish throne to a child of eight years 
old, and the internal difficulties of the realm broke out in civil strife. 
To the great barons on either side the border the late peace involved 
serious losses, for many of the Scotch houses held large estates in 
England, as many of the English lords held large estates in Scotland ; 
and although the treaty had provided for their claims, they had in each 
case been practically set aside. It is this discontent of the barons 
at the new settlement which explains the sudden success of Edward 
Balliol in his snatch at the Scottish throne. In spite of King Edward's 
prohibition, he sailed from England at the head of a body of nobles 
Vv'ho claimed estates in the north, landed on the shores of Fife, and, 
after repulsing with immense loss an army which attacked him near 
Perth, was crowned at Scone while David Bruce fled helplessly to 
France. Edward had given no aid to the enterprise, but the crisis 
tempted his ambition, and he demanded and obtained from Balliol 
an acknowledgment of the abandoned suzerainty. The acknow- 
ledgment, however, was fatal to Balliol himself. He was at once 
driven from his realm, and Berwick, which he had agreed to surrender, 
was strongly garrisoned. The town was soon besieged, but a Scotch 
army under the regent Douglas, brother to the famous Sir James, 
advanced to its relief, and attacked the covering force, which was en- 
camped on the strong position of Halidon Hill. The English bowmen, 
however, vindicated the fame they had first won at Falkirk, and were 
--lOon to crown in the victory of Cressy ; and the Scotch only struggled 
through the marsh which covered the English front to be riddled with 
a storm of arrows, and to break in utter rout. The battle decided the 
fate of Berwick, and from that time the town remained the one part 
of Edward's conquests which was preserved by the English crown. 
Fragment as it was, it was viewed legally as representing the realm 
of which it had once formed a part. As Scotland, it had its chan- 
cellor, chamberlain, and other officers of State; and the peculiar 
heading of Acts of Parliament enacted for England " and the town 
of Berwick-upon-Tweed" still preserves the memory of its peculiar 
position. Balliol was restored to his throne by the conquerors, and 
his formal cession of the Lowlands to England rewarded their aid. 
During the next three years Edward persisted in the line of policy 
he had adopted, retaining his hold over Southern Scotland, and 
aiding his sub-king Balliol in campaign after campaign against the 
despairing efforts of the Douglases and other nobles who still adhered 
to the house of Bruce. His perseverance was all but crowned with 
success, when the outbreak of war with France saved Scotland by 

P 



Sec. VI. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



rCHAP, 



Sec. VI. 

The Scotch 
War OB' 

Indepen-^ 

DENCE. 

1306- 
1342. 



drawing the strength of England across the Channel. The patriot 
party drew again together. Balliol found himself at last without an 
adherent and withdrew to the Court of Edward, while David returned 
to his kingdom, and won back the chief fastnesses of the Lowlands. 
The freedom of Scotland was, in fact, secured. From a war of conquest 
and patriotic resistance the struggle died into a petty strife between 
two angry neighbours, which became a mere episode in the larger 
contest between England and France, 



*>ir 



FEUNCE AT THE TREATY OF BRETIGIST 




0-|45| 



Stcaxfbrcis Geographixyi2/ Estah^ 



London: MacmiTlan. & Co. 



v.\ 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



CHAPTER V. 

THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 

1336-1431. 

Section I.— Edward tlie Third, 1336— 1360. 

[Authorities. — The concluding part of the chronicle of Walter of Hemin- 
burgh or Hemingford seems to have been jotted down as news of the passing 
events reached its author ; it ends on the verge of Cressy. Another con- 
temporary account, Robert of Avesbury's history of the '^wonderful deeds of 
Edward the Third" to the year 1356, has been published by Hearne. A third by 
Knyghton, a canon of Leicester, will be found in Twysden's " Decem Scrip- 
tores." At the close of this century and the beginning of the next the succes- 
sive annals of the Abbey of St. Albans were throw^n together by Walsingham 
in the '*Historia Anglicana" which bears his name, the history of whose 
compilation has been fully explained by Mr. Riley in the prefaces to the 
"Chronica Monasterii S. Albani," published by the Master of the Rolls. 
The State documents and negotiations of the period will be found in the 
Foedera. For the P'rench war itself our primary authority is the recently dis- 
covered chronicle of Jehan le Bel, a canon of S. Lambert of Liege, who had 
himself served in Edward's campaign against the Scots, and spent the rest 
of his life at the Court of John of Hainault. ( "Jehan le Bel, Chroniques." 
Edited by M. L. Polain, Brussels. 1863). Up to the Treaty of Bretigny, 
where it closes, Froissart has done little more than copy this work, making 
however large additions from his own inquiries, especially in the Flemish and 
Breton campaigns and the account of Cressy. The history of Froissart's own 
work has lately been cleared up by Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove. A Hain- 
aulter of Valenciennes, he held a post in Queen Philippa's household from 
L361 to 1369 ; and under this influence produced in 1373 the first edition of 
his well-known chronicle. A later edition is far less English in tone, and 
a third version, begun by him in his old age after a long absence from England, 
is distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity and picturesqueness 
blind us to the inaccuracy of his details, but as an historical authority he is 
of no great value. The incidental mention of Cressy and the later English 
expeditions by Villani in his great Florentine Chronicle, are, on the other 
hand, of much importance. The best modern account of this period is 
that by Mr. W. Longman, '* History of Edward the Third." Mr. Morley 
("English Writers ") has treated in great detail of Chaucer.] 



In the middle of the fourteenth century the great movement towards | 
freedom and unity which had begun under the last of the Norman 
Kings seemed to have reached its end, and the perfect fusion of con- > 



212 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



quered and conquerors into an English people was marked by the 
disuse, even amongst the nobler classes, of the French tongue. In 
spite of the efforts of the grammar schools, and of the strength of 
fashion, English was winning its way throughout the reign of Edward 
the Third to its final triumph in that of his grandson. ^' Children 
in school," says a writer of the earlier reign, " against the usage and 
manner of all other nations, be compelled for to leave their own 
language, and for to construe their lessons and their things in French, 
and so they have since Normans first came into England. Also 
gentlemen's children be taught to speak French from the time that 
they be rocked in their cradle, and know how to speak and play with 
a child's toy ; and uplandish (or country) men will liken themselves 
to gentlemen, and fondell (or delight) with great busyness for to 
speak French to be told of." " This manner," adds a translator of 
Richard's time, " was much used before the first murrain (the plague 
of 1349), and is since somewhat changed; for John Cornewaile, a 
master of grammar, changed the lore in grammar school and con- 
struing from French into English ; and Richard Pencriche learned 
this manner of teaching of him, as others did of Pencriche. So that 
now, the year of our Lord, 1385, and of the second King Richard after 
the conquest here, in all the grammar schools of England children 
learneth French, and construeth and learneth in English." A more 
formal note of the change thus indicated is found in the Statute of 
1362, which orders English to be used in the pleadings of courts of 
law, because '^ the French tongue is much unknown." The tendency 
to a general use of the national tongue told powerfully on literature. 
The influence of the French romances had everywhere tended to make 
French the one literary language at the opening of the fourteenth 
century, and in England this influence had been backed by the French 
tone of the court of Henry the Third and the three Edv/ards. But 
at the close of the reign of Edward the Third the long French romances 
were translated even for knightly hearers. " Let clerks indite in 
Latin," says the author of the "Testament of Love," "and let French- 
men in their French also indite their quaint terms, for it is kindly to 
their mouths ; and let us show our fantasies in such wordes as we 
learned of our mother's tongue." The new national life aflbrded 
nobler material than " fantasies " for English literature. With the com 
pletion of the work of national unity had come the completion of the 
work of national freedom. Under the first Edward the Parhament 
had vindicated its right to the control of taxation, under the second it 
had advanced from the removal of ministers to the deposition of -a 
King, under the third it gave its voice on questions of peace and 
war, controlled expenditure, and regulated the course of civil admi- 
jnistration. The vigour of English life showed itself socially in the 
' wide extension of commerce ; in the rapid growth of the woollen 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



manufactures after the settlement of Flemish weavers en the eastern 
coast ; in the progress of the towns, fresh as they were from the 
victory of the craft-guilds ; and in the development of agriculture 
through the rise of the tenant-farmer. It gave nobler signs of its 
activity in the spirit of national independence and moral earnestness 
which awoke at the call of Wyclif. New forces of thought and feeling, 
which were destined to tell on every age of our later history, broke 
their way through the crust of feudahsm in the socialist revolt of 
the Lollards, and a sudden burst of mihtary glory threw its glamour 
over the age of Cressy and Poitiers. 

It is this new gladness of a great people which utters itself in the 
verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. In spite of a thousand conjectures, we 
know little of the life of our first great poet. From his own statement 
v/e gather that he was born about the middle of the fourteenth 
century. His death must have taken place about the year of its close. 
His fam.ily, though not noble, seems to have been of some importance, 
for, from the opening of his career, we find Chaucer in close connexion 
with the Court. He first bore arms in the campaign of 1359, t)ut 
he was luckless enough to be made prisoner ; and from the time of his 
release after the treaty of Bretigny he took no further share in the 
military enterprises of his time. His marriage with a sister of the 
famous Katherine Swynford, the mistress, and at a later time the wife 
of John of Gaunt, identified him with the fortunes of the Duke of 
Lancaster ; it was as his adherent that he sate in the Parliament 
of 1386, and to his patronage that he owed a sinecure offtce in the 
Customs and an appointment as clerk of the Royal Works. A mission, 
which was probably connected with the financial straits of the Crown, 
carried him in early life to Italy. He visited Genoa and the brilliant 
court of the Visconti at Milan ; at Florence, where the memory of 
Da.nte, the "great master," whom he commemorates so reverently 
i\\ his verse, was still living, he may have met Boccacio ; at Padua, 
like his own clerk of Oxenford, he may have caught the story of 
Griseldis from the lips of Petrarca. But with these few facts and 
guesses our knowledge of him ends. In person, the portrait of Occleve, 
which preserves for us his forked beard, his dark-coloured dress and 
hood, the knife and pen-case at his girdle, is supplemented by a few 
vivid touches of his own. The Host in the '^ Canterbury Tales ^' 
describes him as one who looked on the ground as though he would find 
a hare, as elf-like in face, but portly of waist. He heard little of his 
neighbours' talk ; when labour was over "thou goest home to thine 
own house anon, and also dumb as a stone. Thou sittest at another 
book till fully dazed is thy look, and livest thus as an hermite, 
although thy abstinence is lite (little). '^ But of this abstraction from his 
fellows there is no trace in his verse. No poetry was ever more human 
than Chaucer's ; none ever caine more frankly and genially home to its 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ClIAF. 



readers. The first note of his song is a note of freshness and glad- 
ness. " Of ditties and of songes glad, the which he for my sake made, 
the land fulfilled is over all," says the sober Gower, in his lifetime ; and 
the impression of gladness remains just as fresh now that four hundred 
years have passed away. The historical character of Chaucer's work 
lies on its surface. It stands out in vivid contrast with the poetic litera- 
ture from the heart of which it sprang. The long French romances were 
the product of an age of wealth and ease, of indolent curiosity, of a 
fanciful and self-indulgent sentiment. Of the great passions which 
gave life to the Middle Ages, that of religious enthusiasm had degene- 
rated into the pretty conceits of Mariolatry, that of war into the 
gorgeous extravagances of Chivalry. Love, indeed, remained ; it was 
the one theme of troubadour and trouveur, but it was a love of refine- 
ment, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of sensuous enjoy- 
ment — a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to reflect the 
pleasant indolence of man ; the song of the minstrel moved through a 
perpetual May-time ; the grass was ever green ; the music of the lark 
and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay 
avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life : life 
was too amusing to be serious, too piquant, too sentimental, too full of 
interest and gaiety and chat. It was an age of talk : " mirth is 
none," says the host, '^ to ride on by the way dumb as a stone ; " and 
the Trouveur aimed simply at being the most agreeable talker of his day. 
His romances, his rhymes of King Horn or Sir Tristram, his Romance 
of the Rose, are full of colour and fantasy, endless in detail, but with a 
sort of gorgeous idleness about their very length, the minuteness of 
their description of outer things, the vagueness of their touch when it 
passes to the subtler inner world. Nothing is more unreal than the 
tone of the French romance, nothing more absolutely real than the 
tone of Chaucer. If with the best modern critics we reject from the 
list of his genuine works the bulk of the poems which preceded 
" Troilus and Cressida," we see at once that, familiar as he was with the 
literature of the Trouveres, his real sympathies drew him not to the 
dying verse of France, but to the new and mighty upgrowth of poetry 
in Italy. Dante's eagle looks at him from the sun. "Fraunces 
Petrark, the laureat poete," is to him one " whose rethorique sweete 
enlumyned al Itail of poetrie." The " Troilus " is an enlarged English 
version of Boccacio's " Filostrato," the Knight's Tale of his Teseide. It 
was, indeed, the " Decameron " which suggested the very form of the 
" Canterbury Tales.'^ But even while changing, as it were, the front of 
Enghsh poetry, Chaucer preserves his own distinct personality. If 
he quizzes in the rime of Sir Thopaz the wearisome idleness of the f 
French romance, he retains all that was worth retaining of the French \ 
temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its lightness and 
brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gaiety and good humour, its 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



critical coolness and self-control. The French wit quickens in him 
more than in any English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of 
our national disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves its 
somwhat ponderous morality. If, on the other hand, he echoes the 
joyous carelessness of the Italian tale, he tempers it with the English 
seriousness. As he follows Boccacio, all his changes are on the side of 
purity ; and when the Troilus of the Florentine ends with the old sneer 
at the changeableness of woman, Chaucer bids us " look Godward/' 
and dwells on the unchangeableness of Heaven. 

But the genius of Chaucer was neither French nor Italian, what- 
ever element it might borrow from either literature, but English to 
the core. Of the history of the great poem on which his fame must 
rest, or of the order in which the " Canterbury Tales " were really 
written, we know nothing. The work was the fruit of his old age : it 
was in his last home, the house in the garden of St. Mary^s Chapel at 
Westminster, that Chaucer rested from his labours ; and here he must 
have been engaged on the poem which his death left unfinished. Its 
story — that of a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury — not only 
enabled him to string together a number of tales which seem to have 
been composed at very different times, but lent itself admirably to the 
peculiar characteristics of his poetic temper, dramatic power, and the 
universality of his S3anpathy. His tales cover the whole field of 
medieval poetry ; the legend of the priest, the knightly romance, the 
wonder-tale of the traveller, the broad humour of the fabliau, allegory 
and apologue, all are there. He finds a yet wider scope for his genius 
in the persons who tell these stories, the thirty pilgrims who start in the 
May morning from the Tabard in South wark — thirty distinct figures, 
representatives of every class of English society, from the noble to the 
ploughman. We see the "verray perfight gentil knight "in cassock 
and coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as the 
May morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman, in his coat 
and hood of green, with the good bow in his hand. A group of 
ecclesiastics lights up for us the mediaeval church — the brawny hunt- 
loving monk, whose bridle jingles as loud and clear as the chapel-bell 
— the wanton friar, first among the beggars and harpers of the 
country side — the poor parson, threadbare, learned, and devout 
(" Christ's lore and His apostles' twelve he taught, and first he followed 
it himself") — the summoner with his fier}^ face — the pardoner with his 
wallet "bret-full of pardons, come from Rome all hot" — the lively 
prioress with her courtly French lisp, her soft little red mouth, and 
" Amor vincit omnia " graven on her brooch. Learning is there in the 
portly person of the doctor of law, rich with the profits of the 
pestilence— the busy serjeant-of-law, ^^ that ever seemed busier than he 
was" — the hollow- cheeked clerk of Oxford, with his love of books, and 
short, sharp sentences that disguise a latent tenderness which breaks 



2l6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



out at last in the story of Griseldis. Around them crowd types af 
English industry ; the merchant ; the franklin, in whose house " it 
snowed of meat and drink ;^' the sailor fresh from frays in the Channel ; 
the buxom wife of Bath ; the broad-shouldered miller; the haberdasher, 
carpenter, weaver, dyer, tapestry-maker, each in the new livery of his 
craft ; and last, the honest ploughman, who would dyke and delve for 
the poor without hire. It is the first time in English poetry that we 
are brought face to face not with characters or allegories or reminis- 
cences of the past, but with living and breathing men, men distinct 
in temper and sentiment as in face or costume or mode of speech; and 
with this distinctness of each maintained throughout the story by a 
thousand shades of expression and action. It is the first time, too, that 
we meet with the dramatic power which not only creates each 
character, but combines it with its fellows, which not only adjusts each 
tale or jest to the temper of the person who utters it, but fuses all 
into a poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its com- 
plexity, which surrounds us in the " Canterbury Tales.^' In some of the 
stories, indeed, composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the 
tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman ; but 
taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters, but of 
a man of action. He has received his training from war, courts, 
business, travel — a training not of books, but of life. And it is life that 
he loves — the delicacy of its sentiment, the breadth of its farce, its 
laughter and its tears, the tenderness of its Griseldis or the Smollett- 
like adventures of the miller and the schoolboy. It is this largeness 
of heart, this wide tolerance, which enables him to reflect man for us as 
none but Shakspeare has ever reflected it, but to reflect it v/ith a pathos, 
a shrewd sense and kindly humour, a freshness and joyousness of feel- 
ing, that even Shakspeare has not surpassed. 

It is strange that such a voice as this should have awakened no 
echo in the singers who follow ; but the first burst of English song 
died as suddenly and utterly with Chaucer as the hope and glory of his 
age. The hundred years which follow the brief sunshine of Cressy and 
the " Canterbury^ Tales " are years of the deepest gloom ; no age of our 
history is so sad and sombre as the age vv^hich we traverse from the 
third Edward to Joan of Arc. The throb of hope and glory which 
pulsed at its outset through every class of EngHsh society died into 
inaction or despair. Material life lingered on indeed, commerce still 
widened, but its progress was dissociated from all the nobler elements of 
national well-being. The towns sank again into close oligarchies ; the 
bondsmen struggHng forward to freedom fell back into a serfage which 
still leaves its trace on the soil. Literature reached its lowest ebb. 
The religious revival of the Lollard was trodden out in blood, while 
the Church shrivelled into a self-seeking secular priesthood. In the 
clash of civil strife poHtical freedom was all but extinguished, and the 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



217 



age which began with the Good Parliament ended with the despotism j 
of the Tudors. i 

The secret of the change is to be found in the fatal war which for I 
more than a hundred years drained the strength and corrupted the j 
temper of the Enghsh people. We have followed the attack on j 
Scotland to its disastrous close, but the struggle ere it ended, had in- 1 
volved England in a second contest, to which, for the sake of clearness, j 
we have only slightly alluded, but to which we must now turn back, a : 
contest yet more ruinous than that v/hich Edward the First had 
begun. From the war with Scotland sprang the hundred years' 
struggle with France. From the first, France had v/atched the suc- 
cesses of her rival in the north, partly with a natural jealousy, but 
still more as likely to afford her an opening for winning the great 
southern Duchy of Guienne — the one fragment of Eleanor's inheritance 
which remained to her descendants. Scotland had no sooner begun 
to resent the claims of her over-lord, Edward the First, than a pre- 
text for interference was found in the rivalry between the mariners 
of Normandy and those of the Cinque Ports, which culminated at 
the moment in a great sea-fight that proved fatal to 8,000 Frenchmen. 
So eager was Edward to avert a quarrel with France, that his threats 
roused the English seamen to a characteristic defiance. "Be the 
King's Council well advised," ran the remonstrance of the mariners, 
"that if wrong or grievance be done them in any fashion against 
right, they will sooner forsake wives, children, and all that they have, 
and go seek through the seas where they shall think to make their 
profit." In spite, therefore, of Edward's efforts the contest continued, 
and Philip found an opportunity to cite the King before his court at 
Paris for wrongs done to his suzerain. Ag^n Edward endeavoured 
to avert the conflict by a formal cession of Guienne into Philip's hands 
during forty days, but the refusal of the French sovereign to restore 
the province left no choice for him but vv^ar. The instant revolt of 
Balliol proved that the French outrage was but the first blow in a 
deliberate and long-planned scheme of attack ; Edward had for a 
while no force to waste on France, and when the first conquest of 
Scotland freed his hands, his league with Flanders for the recovery of 
Guienne was foiled by the refusal of his baronage to follow him on a 
foreign campaign. Even after the victory of Falkirk, Scotch inde- 
pendence was still saved, as we have seen, for three years by the 
threats of France and the intervention of its ally, Boniface the Eighth ; 
and it was only the quarrel of these two confederates w^hich allowed 
Edward to complete its subjection. But the rising under Bruce was 
again backed by French aid and by the renewal of the old quarrel over 
Guienne — a quarrel which hampered England through the reign of 
Edward the Second, and which indirectly brought about his terrible 
fall. The accession of Edward the Third secured a momentary 



Sec. I. 

Edward 
THE Third, 

1336- 
1360. 

England 

and 
France. 



2l8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



peace, but the fresh attack on Scotland which marked the opening 
of his reign kindled hostihty anew; the young King David found 
refuge in France, and arms, money, and men were despatched from 
its ports to support his cause. It was this intervention of France 
which foiled Edward's hopes of the submission of Scotland at the 
very moment when success seemed in his grasp ; the solemn announce- 
ment by Charles of Valois that his treaties bound him to give effective 
help to his old ally, and the assembly of a French fleet in the Channel 
drew the King from his struggle in the north to face a storm which 
his negotiations could no longer avert. 

The two weapons on which Edward counted for success at the 
opening of the contest thus forced on him were the wealth of England 
and his claim upon the crown of France. The commerce of the 
country was still mainly limited to the exportation of wool to Flanders, 
but the rapid rise of this trade may be conjectured from the fact that 
in a single year Edward received more than ^80,000 from duties 
levied on wool alone. So fine was the breed of sheep, that the expor- 
tation of live rams for the improvement of foreign wool was forbidden 
by law, though a flock is said to have been smuggled out of the realm 
shortly after, and to have become the source of the famous merinos of 
Spain. Up to Edward's time few woollen fabrics seem to have been 
woven in England, though Flemish weavers had come over with the 
Conqueror to found the prosperity of Norwich ; but the number of 
weavers' guilds shows that the trade was gradually extending. Edward 
appears to have taken it under his especial care ; at the outset of his 
reign he invited Flemish weavers to settle in his country, and took 
the new immigrants, v/ho chose principally Norfolk, Suffolk, and 
Essex for the seat of their trade, under his especial protection. It 
was on the wealth which England derived from the great development 
of its commerce that the King relied in the promotion of a great 
league with Flanders and the Empire, by which he proposed to bring 
the French war to an end. Anticipating the later policy of Godolphin 
and Pitt, Edward became the paymaster of the poorer princes of 
Germany ; his subsidies purchased the aid of Hainault, Gueldres, and 
Juliers ; sixty thousand crowns v/ent to the Duke of Brabant, while 
the Emperor himself was induced by a promise of 3,000 gold 
florins to furnish 2,000 men-at-arms. Years, however, of elaborate 
negotiations and profuse expenditure brought the King little fruit save 
the title of Vicar-General of the Empire on the left of the Rhine; 
now the Flemings hung back, now his imperial allies refused to move 
v/ithout the Emperor's express consent ; and when the host at last 
crossed the border Edward found it impossible to bring the French 
King to an engagement. Philip, meanwhile, was busy in sweeping 
the Channel and harrying the shores of England ; and his threats of 
invasion were only averted by a naval victory off the Flemish coast, in 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



219 



which Edward in person utterly destroyed for the time the fleet of 
France. The King's difficulties, however, had at last reached their 
height. His loans from the great bankers of Florence amounted to 
half-a-million of our money ; his overtures for peace were con- 
temptuously rejected; his claim to the French crown found not a 
single adherent. To establish such a claim, indeed, was difficult 
enough. The three sons of Philip le Bel had died without male 
issue, and Edward claimed as the son of Philip's daughter Isabella. 
But though her brothers had left no sons, they had left daughters ; 
and if female succession were admitted, these daughters of Philip's 
sons would precede the son of Philip's daughter. If, on the other 
hand, as the great bulk of French jurists asserted, only male succession 
gave right to the throne, then the right of Philip le Bel was exhausted, 
and the crown passed to the son of his brother Charles, who had in 
fact peacefully succeeded to it as Charles of Valois. By a legal 
subtlety, however, while asserting the rights of female succession and 
of the line of PhiHp le Bel, Edward alleged that the nearest living male 
descendant of that King could claim in preference to females who were 
related to him in as near a degree. Though advanced on the accession 
of Charles of Valois, the claim seems to have been regarded on both 
sides as a mere formality ; Edward, in fact, did full and liege homage 
to his rival for his Duchy of Guienne ; and it was not till his hopes 
from Germany had been exhausted, and his claim was found to be 
useful in securing the loyal aid of the Flemish cities, that it was 
brought seriously to the front. But a fresh campaign in the Low 
Countries was as fruitless as its predecessors, and the ruin of the 
English party in Flanders, through the death of its chief, Van 
Arteveld, was poorly compensated by a new opening for attack in 
Britanny, where, of the two rival claimants to the Duchy, one did 
homage to Philip and the other to Edward. 

The failure of his foreign hopes threw Edward on the resources of 
England itself, and it was with an army of thirty thousand men that 
he landed at La Hogue, and commenced a march which was to change 
the whole face of the war. His aim was simply to advance ravaging to 
the north, where he designed to form a junction with a Flemish force 
gathered at Gravelines, but the rivers between them were carefully 
guarded, and it was only by throwing a bridge across the Seine at 
Poissy, and by forcing the ford of Blanche-Tete on the Somme, that 
Edward escaped the necessity of surrendering to the vast host which 
was hastening in pursuit. His communications, however, were no 
sooner secured than he halted at the little village of Cressy in Ponthieu 
and resolved to give battle. Half of his army, now greatly reduced in 
, strength, consisted of the light-armed footmen of Ireland and Wales • 
the bulk of the remainder was composed of English bowmen. The 
King ordered his men-at-arms to dismount, and drew up his forces on I 



HISTORY OF THE L 



ri PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



a low rise sloping gently to the so t a windmill on its 

summit from which he could over . . ole field of battle. 

Immediately beneath him lay the reserve, whuc he base of the slope 
was placed the main body of the army in two divisions, that to the 
right commanded by the young Prince of Wales, that to the left by 
the Earl of Northampton. A small ditch protected the English front, . 
and behind it the bowmen were drawn up " in the form of a harrow,^ 
with small bombards between them "which, with fire, threw little 
iron balls to frighten the horses '^ — the first instance of the use of 
artillery in field warfare. The halt of the English army took Philip 
by surprise, and he attempted for a time to check the advance of his 
army, but the disorderly host rolled on to the English front. The sight 
of his enemies, indeed, stirred the King's own blood to fury, ^' for he 
hated them," and at vespers the fight began. Fifteen thousand Genoese 
crossbowmen, hired from among the soldiers of the Lord of Monaco, on 
the sunny Riviera, were ordered to begin the attack. The men were 
weary with the march ; a sudden storm wetted and rendered useless 
their bowstrings ; and the loud shouts with which they leapt forward 
to the encounter were met with dogged silence in the English ranks. 
Their first arrow- flight, however, brought a terrible reply. So rapid 
was the English shot, '* that it seemed as if it snowed." *' Kill me these 
scoundrels," shouted Philip, as the Genoese fell back ; and his men-at- 
arms plunged butchering into their broken ranks, while the Counts of 
Alengon and Flanders, at the head of the French knighthood, fell 
hotly on the Prince's line. For the instant his small force seemed lost, 
but Edward refused to send him aid. "Is he dead or unhorsed, 
or so wounded that he cannot help himself.'^" he asked the envoy. 
" No, Sir," was the reply, " but he is in a hard passage of arms, 
and sorely needs your help." "Return to those that sent you, 
Sir Thomas," "said the King, " and bid them not send to me again so 
long as my son lives ! Let the boy win his spurs ; for I wish, if God 
so order it, that the day may be his, and that the honour may be 
v/ith him and them to whom I have given it in charge." Edward 
could see, in fact, from his higher ground, that all went well. The bow- 
men and men-at-arms held their ground stoutly, while the Welshmen 
were stabbing the horses in the mel^e, and bringing knight after 
knight to the ground. Soon the great French host was wavering in 
a fatal confusion. " You are my vassals, my friends," cried the blind 
King of Bohemia, who had joined Philip's army, to the nobles around 
him : " I pray and beseech you to lead me so far into the fight that 
I may strike one good blow with this sword of mine ! " Linking their 
bridles together, the little company plunged into the thick of the 
combat to fall as their fellows were falling. The battle went steadily 
against the French : at last Philip himself hurried from the field, 
and the defeat became a rout : 1,200 knights and 30,000 footmen — • 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



221 



a number equal to the whole English force — lay dead upon the 
ground. 

"God has punished us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. 

Denys^ in a passion of bewildered grief, as he tells the rout of the great 

host which he had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the 

fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible then as 

the fall of chivalry. The lesson which England had learnt at Ban- 

nockburn she taught the world at Cressy. The whole social and 

political fabric of the Middle Ages rested on a military base, and its 

base was suddenly withdrawn. The churl had struck down the 

noble ; the bondsman proved more than a match in sheer hard 

fighting for the knight. From the day of Cressy feudalism tottered 

slowly but surely to its grave. But to England the day was the 

beginning of a career of military glory, which, fatal as it was destined to 

prove to the higher sentiments and interests of the nation, gave it for 

the moment an energy such as it had never known before. Victory 

followed victory. A few months after Cressy a Scotch army which 

had burst into the north was routed at Neville's Cross, and its King, 

David, taken prisoner ; while the withdrav/al of the French from 

the Garonne left England unopposed in Guienne and Poitou. 

Edward's aim, however, was not to conquer France, but simply to save 

English commerce by securing the mastery of the Channel. Calais 

was the great pirate-haven ; in one year alone, twenty-two privateers 

had sailed from its port ; while its capture promised the King an easy 

base of communication with Flanders, and of operations against 

France. The siege lasted a year, and it was not till Philip had failed 

to relieve it that the town was starved into surrender. Mercy was 

granted to the garrison and the people on condition that twelve of the 

citizens gave themselves unconditionally into the King's hands. " On 

them," said Edward, with a burst of bitter hatred, " I will do my will." 

At the sound of the town bell, Jehan le Bel tells us, the folk of Calais 

gathered round the bearer of these termis, " desiring to hear their good 

news, for they were all mad with hunger. When the said knight told 

them his news, then began they to weep and cry so loudly that it was 

great pity. Then stood up the wealthiest burgess of the town, Master 

Eustache de S. Pierre by name, and spake thus before all : ' My masters, 

great grief and mishap it were for all to leave such a people as this is 

to die by famine or otherwise ; and great charity and grace would he 

win from our Lord who could defend them from dying. For me, I have 

great hope in the Lord that if I can save this people by my death, I shall 

have pardon for my faults, wherefore will I be the first of the six, and of 

my own will put myself barefoot in my shirt and with a halter round 

my neck in the mercy of King Edward.' " The list of devoted men 

was soon made up, and the twelve victims were led before the King. 

^- All the host assembled together ; there was great press, and many 



Edward 
THE Third. 

1336- 
i360. 



222 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap„ 



bade hang them openly, and many wept for pity. The noble King 
came with his train of counts and barons to the place, and the Queen 
followed him, though great with child, to see what there would be. The 
six citizens knelt down at once before the King, and Master Eustache 
said thus : ' Gentle King, here be we six who have been of the old 
bourgeoisie of Calais and great merchants ; we bring you the keys of 
the town and castle of Calais, and render them to you at your pleasure. 
We set ourselves in such wise as you see purely at your will, to save 
the remnant of the people that has suffered much pain. So may you 
have pity and mercy on us for your high nobleness' sake.' Certes^ 
there was^then in that place neither lord nor knight that wept not for 
pity, nor who could speak for pity ; but the King had his heart so 
hardened by wrath, that for a long while he could not reply ; then he 
commanded to cut off their heads. All the knights and lords prayed 
him with tears, as much as they could, to have pity on them, but he 
would not hear. Then spoke the gentle knight. Master Walter de 
Manny, and said, ' Ha, gentle sire ! bridle your wrath ; you have the 
renown and good fame of all gentleness ; do not a thing whereby men 
can speak any villany of you ! If you have no pity, all men will say 
that you have a heart full of all cruelty to put these good citizens to 
death that of their own will are come to render themselves to you to 
save the remnant of their people.' At this point the King changed 
countenance with wrath, and said, ' Hold your peace. Master Walter ! 
it shall be none otherwise. Call the headsman ! They of Calais have 
made so many of my men die, that they must die themselves ! ' Then 
did the noble Queen of England a deed of noble lowliness, seeing she 
was great with child, and wept so tenderly for pity, that she could no 
longer stand upright ; therefore she cast herself on her knees before her 
lord the King, and spake on this wise : ' Ah, gentle sire ! from the day 
that I passed over sea in great peril, as you know, I have asked for 
nothing : now pray I and beseech you, with folded hands, for the love 
of our Lady's Son, to have mercy upon them.' The gentle King 
waited a while before speaking, and looked on the Queen as she knelt 
before him bitterly weeping. Then began his heart to soften a little, 
and he said, ' Lady, I would rather you had been otherwhere ; you 
pray so tenderly, that I dare not refuse you ; and though I do it 
against my will, nevertheless take them, I give them you.' Then took 
he the six citizens by the halters and delivered them to the Queen, 
and released from death all those of Calais for the love of her ; and 
the good lady bade them clothe the six burgesses and make them 
good cheer." 

A great naval victory won over a Spanish pirate fleet which was 
sweeping the narrow seas completed the work which had begun with 
the capture of Calais. In Froissart's naval picture we see the King 
sitting on deck in his jacket of black velvet, his head covered with 



I 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' VVAl 



a black beaver hat which became him well, and calling on his 
minstrels to play to him on the horn, and on John Chandos to troll out I 
the songs he has brought over from Germany, till the great Spanish 
ships heave in sight, and a furious struggle begins which ends in their ' 
destruction. Edward was now " King of the Sea," but peace with 
France was as far oif as ever. Even the truce which had for eight 
years been forced on both countries by sheer exhaustion became at 
last impossible. Edward threw three armies at once on the French 
coast, but the campaign proved a fruitless one. The " Black Prince," 
as the hero of Cressy was now styled, alone won a disgraceful 
success. Northern and central France had by this time fallen into 
utter ruin ; the royal treasury was empty, the fortresses unoccupied, 
the troops disbanded for want of pay, the country swept by bandits. 
Only the south remained at peace, and the young Prince led his army 
of freebooters up the Garonne into " what was before one of the fat 
countries of the world, the people good and simple, who did not know 
what war was ; indeed, no war had been waged against them till the 
Prince came. The English and Gascons found the countr)^ full and 
gay, the rooms adorned with carpets and draperies, the caskets and 
chests full of fair jewels. But nothing was safe from these robbers. 
They, and especially the Gascons, who are very greedy, carried off 
everything." The captain of Narbonne loaded, them with booty, and 
they fell back to Bordeaux, " their horses so laden with spoil that they 
could hardly move." With the same aim of plunder, the Black Prince 
started the next year for the Loire ; but the assembly of a French 
army under John, who had succeeded Philip of Valois on the throne, 
forced him to retreat. As he approached Poitiers, however, he found 
the French, who now numbered 60,000 men, in his path. The Prince 
at once took a strong position in the fields of Maupertuis, his front 
covered by thick hedges, and approachable only by a deep and narrow 
lane which ran between vineyards. The Prince lined the vineyards 
and hedges with bowmen, and drew up his small body of men-at-arms 
at the point where the lane opened upon the higher plain where he 
was encamped. His force numbered only 8,000 men, and the danger 
was great enough to force him to offer the surrender of his prisoners, 
and an oath not to fight against France for seven years, in exchange 
for a free retreat. The terms were rejected, and three hundred French 
knights charged up the narrow lane. It was soon choked with men 
and horses, while the front ranks of the advancing army fell back 
before the galling fire of arrows from the hedgerows. In the moment 
of confusion a body of English horsemen, posted on a hill to the right, 
charged suddenly on the French flank, and the Prince seized the 
opportunity to fall boldly on their front. The English archery com- 
pleted the disorder produced by this sudden attack; the French 
King was taken, desperately fighting ; and at noontide, when his army 



Sec. I. 

Edward 
THE Third. 

1SS6- 

laeo. 



1347 1355. 



Poitiers, 

Sep. 19, 

1355. 



224 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



poured back in utter rout to the gates of Poitiers^ 8,000 of their 
number had fallen on the field, 3,000 in the flight, and 2,000 men- 
at-arms, with a crowd of nobles, were taken prisoners. The royal 
captive entered London in triumph, and a truce for two years seemed 
to give healing-time to France. But the miserable country found 
no rest in itself. The routed soldiery turned into free companies 
of bandits, while the captive lords purchased their ransom by ex- 
tortion which drove the peasantry into universal revolt. "Jacques 
Bonhomme," as the insurgents called themselves, waged war against 
the castles ; while Paris, impatient of the weakness and misrule of the 
Regency, rose in arms against the Crown. The rising had hardly 
been crushed, when Edward again poured ravaging over the wasted 
land. Famine, however, proved its best defence. " I could not 
believe," said Petrarch of this time, " that this was the same France 
which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself 
to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated, 
houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere 
marks of desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, 
the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude." 
Both parties were at last worn out. Edward^s army had fallen back, 
ruined, on the Loire, when proposals of peace reached him. By the 
treaty of Bretigny, the English King waived his claims on the crown 
of France and on the Duchy of Normandy. On the other hand, his 
Duchy of Acquitaine, which included Gascony, Guienne, Poitou, and 
Saint onge, was left to him, no longer as a fief, but in full sove- 
reignty, while his new conquest of Calais remained a part of the 
possessions of the English crown. 

Section II.— The Good Parliasnent, 1360—1377, 

\_Authorities . — As in the last period : adding the account of the Good Parlia* 
ment given by an anonymous chronicler in the 22nd vol. of the '* Archaeologia. "] 



If we turn from the stirring but barren annals of foreign warfare to 
the more fruitful field of constitutional progress, we are at once struck 
with a marked change which takes place during this period in the 
composition of Parhament. The division, with which we are so famihar, 
into a House of Lords and a House of Commons, formed no part of 
the original plan of Edward the First ; in the earher Parliaments, in 
fact, each of the four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and burgesses 
met, deliberated, and made their grants apart from each other. This 
insolation, however, of the Estates soon showed signs of breaking 
down. While the clergy, as we have seen, held steadily aloof from 
any real union with its fellow-orders, the knights of the shire were 
drawn by the similarity of their social position into a close connexion 



V,] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



225 



with the lords. They seem, in fact, to have been soon admitted by 
the baronage to an almost equal position with themselves, whether as 
legislators or councillors of the Crown. The burgesses, on the other 
hand, took little part in Parliamentary proceedings, save in those 
which related to the taxation of their class. But their position was 
raised by the strifes of the reign which followed, when their aid was 
needed by the baronage in its struggle with the Crown ; and their right 
to share fully in all legislative action was asserted in the f^Lmous statute 
of Edward the Second. Gradually too, through causes with which we 
are imperfectly acquainted, the knights of the shire drifted from their 
older connexion with the baronage into so close and intimate a union 
with the representatives of the towns that at the opening of the reign of 
Edward the Third the two orders are found grouped formally together, 
under the name of " The Commons." It is difficult to over-estimate 
the importance of this change. Had Parliament remained broken up 
into its four orders of clergy, barons, knights, and citizens, its power 
would have been neutralized at every great crisis by the jealousies and 
difficulty of co-operation among its component parts. The permanent 
union of the knighthood and the baronage, on the other hand, would 
have converted Parliament into the mere representative of an aristo- 
cratic caste, and would have robbed it of the strength which it has 
drawn from its connexion with the great body of the commercial 
classes. The new attitude of the knighthood, their social connexion 
as landed gentry with the baronage, their political union with the 
burgesses, really welded the three orders into one, and gave that 
unity of feeling and action to our Parliament on which its power has 
ever since mainly depended. From the moment of this change, 
indeed, we see a marked increase of parliamentary activity. A crowd 
of enactments for the regulation of trade, whether wise or unwise, 
, and for the protection of the subject against oppression or injustice, 
as well as the great ecclesiastical provisions of this reign, show the 
rapid widening of the sphere of parliamentary action. A yet larger 
development of their powers was offered to the Commons by Edward 
himself. In his anxiety to shift from his shoulders the responsibility 
of the war with France, he referred to them for counsel on the 
subject of one of the numerous propositions of peace. As yet, 
however, the Commons shrank from the task of advising the Crown 
on so difficult a subject as that of State policy. " Most dreaded 
lord," they replied, "as to your war and the equipment necessary 
for it, we are so ignorant and simple that we know not how, nor 
have the power, to devise : wherefore we pray your Grace to excuse 
us in this matter, and that it please you, with advice of the great and 
wise persons of your Council, to ordain what seems best to you for the 
honour and profit of yourself and of your kingdom ; and whatsoever 
shall be thus ordained by assent and agreement for you and your lords 

Q 



226 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



we readily assent to, and will hold it firmly established." But while 
shrinking from so wide an extension of their responsibility, the 
Commons wrested from the Crown a practical reform of the highest 
value. As yet their petitions, if granted, had been embodied by the 
Royal Council in ^^ Ordinances " at the close of the session, when 
it was impossible to decide whether the Ordinance was in actual 
accordance with the petition on which it was based. It was now 
agreed that, on the assent of the Crown to their petitions, they should 
at once be converted into "statutes," and derive force of law from 
their entry on the rolls of Parliament. 

The political responsibility which the Commons evaded was at 
last forced on them by the misfortunes of the war. In spite of 
quarrels in • Britanny and elsewhere, peace had been fairly preserved 
in the nine years which followed the treaty of Bretigny ; but the 
shrewd eye of Charles V., the successor of John, was watching keenly 
for the moment of renewing the struggle. He had cleared his 
kingdom of the freebooters by despatching them into Spain, and th e 
Black Prince had plunged into the revolutions of that country only 
to return from his fruitless victory of Navarete in broken health, and 
impoverished by the expenses of the campaign. The anger caused 
by the taxation which this necessitated was fanned by Charles into 
revolt. He listened, in spite of the treaty, to an appeal from the lords 
of Gascony, and summoned the Black Prince to his court. " I will 
come," replied the Prince, "but helmet on head, and with sixty 
thousand men at my back." War, however, had hardly been declared 
before the ability with which Charles had laid his plans was seen 
in the seizure of Ponthieu, and the insurrection of the whole country 
south of the Garonne. The Black Prince, borne on a litter to the 
walls of Limoges, recovered the town, which had been surrendered 
to the French, and by a merciless massacre sullied the fame of his 
earlier exploits ; but sickness recalled him home, and the war, pro- 
tracted by the caution of Charles, who had forbidden his armies 
to engage, did little but exhaust the energy and treasures of Eng- 
land. At last, however, the fatal error of the Prince's policy was 
seen in the appearance of a Spanish fleet in the Channel, and in a 
decisive victory which it won over an EngHsh convoy off Rochelle. 
The blow was in fact fatal to the English cause, wresting as it did from 
them the mastery of the seas ; and Charles was roused to new exer- 
tions. Poitou, Saintonge, and the Angoumois yielded to his general 
Du Guesclin, while a great army under John of Gaunt penetrated 
fruitlessly into the heart of France. Charles had forbidden any fight- 
ing. " If a storm rages over the land," said the King, coolly, " it 
disperses of itself ; and so will it be with the English." Winter, in 
fact, overtook the Duke of Lancaster in the mountains of Auvergne, 
and a mere fragment of his great host reached Bourdeaux. The 



it 



♦i 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



227 



failure was the signal for a general defection, and ere a year had 
passed the two towns of Bourdeaux and Bayonne were all that 
remained of the Enghsh possessions in Acquitaine. 

It was a time of shame and suffering such as England had never 
known. Her conquests were lost, her shores insulted, her fleets anni- 
hilated, her commerce swept from the sea ; while within she was 
exhausted by the long and costly war, as well as by the ravages of 
pestilence. In the hour of distress the eyes of the feudal baronage 
turned greedily on the riches of the Church. Never had her spiritual or 
moral hold on the nation been less ; never had her wealth been greater. 
Out of a population of little more than two millions, the ecclesiastics 
numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, owning in landed 
property alone more than a third of the soil ; their " spiritualities ^^ 
in dues and offerings amounting to twice the royal revenue. The 
position of the bishops as statesmen was still more galling to the 
feudal baronage, flushed as it was vv^ith a new pride by the victories of 
Cressy and Poitiers. On the renewal of the war the Bishop of Win 
Chester, William of Wykeham, was at once removed, with other 
prelates, from the ministry, and their places filled by creatures of the 
baronage, with John of Gaunt, the King's son, at their head. Heavy 
taxes were imposed on church lands, and projects of confiscation 
were openly advocated. But the utter failure of the new administra- 
tion and the calamities of the war left it powerless before the Par- 
liament of 1376. The action of this Parliament marks a new stage 
in the character of the natural opposition to the illegal government 
of the Crown. Till now the task of resistance had devolved on the 
baronage, and had been carried out through risings of its feudal ten- 
antry ; but the misgovernment was now that of the baronage itself. 
The progress of peace and order had rendered a recourse to warfare 
odious to the people at large, while the power of the Commons afforded 
an adequate means of peaceful redress. The old reluctance to meddle 
with matters of state was roughly swept away by the pressure of the 
time. The knights of the shire united with the burgesses in a joint 
attack on the royal council. "Trusting in God, and standing v/ith his 
followers before the nobles, whereof the chief was John Duke of Lan- 
caster, whose doings were ever contrary," their speaker, Sir Peter de 
la Mare, denounced the mismanagement of the war, the oppressive 
taxation, and demanded an account of the expenditure. ^* What do 
these base and ignoble knights attempt 1 " cried John of Gaunt. "Do 
they think they be kings or princes of the land.^*'' But it was soon 
discovered that, sick as he was to death, the Black Prince gave his 
hearty support to the cause of the Commons. Lancaster was forced to 
withdraw from the Council, and the Parliament proceeded fearlessly 
in its task of investigation. A terrible list of abuses was revealed, 
which centred in the infamy of the King himself, who had sunk into 

Q 2 



228 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



a premature dotage, and was wholly under the influence of a mistress 
named Alice Perren. She was forced to swear never to return to the 
King's presence ; and the Parliament proceeded to the impeachment 
and condemnation of two ministers, Lord Latimer and William Lyons, 
and to the solemn presentation of one hundred and sixty petitions 
which embodied the grievances of the realm. They demanded the 
annual assembly of Parliament, and freedom of electioA for the 
knights of the shire, whose choice was now often tampered withby th€ 
Crown ; they protested against arbitrary taxation and Papal inroads 
on the liberties of the Church ; petitioned for the protection of trade, 
and demanded a vigorous prosecution of the war. The death of the 
Prince suddenly interrupted the work of reform ; Lancaster resumed 
his power, and by an unscrupulous interference with elections procured 
the return of a new Parliament, which reversed the Acts of its pre- 
decessor. The greed of the triumphant baronage broke out in a fresh 
strife with the great churchmen who had, whether for their own pur- 
poses or not, supported the popular party. William of Wykeham was 
again dismissed from office, and summoned to Parliament. Fresh 
projects of spoliation were openly canvassed, and it is his support 
of these plans of confiscation which first brings us historically across 
the path of John Wyclif. 



Section III.--Jolin W^ycUf. 

[Authorities, — In addition to the lives of Wyclif by Lewis and Vaughan, 
we now possess Dr. Shirley's invaluable account of the Reformer in his pre- 
face to the ** Fasciculi Zizaniorum '' (published by the Master of the Rolls), the 
documents appended to which are of primary authority for his history and that 
of his followers. Wyclif s English books have been collected by Mr. Thomas 
Arnold for the University of Oxford ; his Bible has been republished with a 
valuable preface by Rev. J. Forshall and Sir F. Madden. Milman ("Latin 
Christianity," vol. vi.) has given a brilliant summary of the Lollard movement.] 



« 



Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the obscu- 
rity of Wyclif 's earlier life and the fulness and vividness of our know- 
ledge of him during the twenty years which preceded its close. Born 
in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, he had already passed 
middle age when he was appointed to the mastership of BaUiol College, 
in the University of Oxford, and recognized as first among the school- 
men of his day. Of all the scholastic doctors those of England had 
been throughout the keenest and the most daring in philosophical 
speculation ; a reckless audacity and love of novelty was the common 
note of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, as against the sober and 
more disciplined learning of the Parisian schoolmen, Albert and 
Aquinas. But the decay of the University of Paris during the English 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



229 



wars had transferred her intellectual supremacy to Oxford, and in Ox- 
ford Wyclif stood without a rival. To his predecessor, Bradwardine, 
whose work as a scholastic teacher he carried on in the speculative 
treatises he published during this period, he owed the tendency to a 
predestinarian Augustinianism which formed the groundwork of his 
later theological revolt. His debt to Ockham revealed itself in his 
earliest efforts at Church reform. Undismayed by the thunder and 
excommunications of the Church, Ockham had not shrunk in his en- 
thusiasm for the Empire from attacking the foundations of the Papal 
supremacy or from asserting the rights of the civil power. The spare, 
emaciated frame of Wyclif, weakened by study and by asceticism, 
hardly promised a Reformer who would carry on the stormy work of 
Ockham ; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and restless, an 
immense energy, an immovable conviction, an unconquerable pride. 
The personal charm which ever accompanies real greatness only 
deepened the influence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. 
As yet indeed even Wyclif himself can hardly have suspected the 
immense range of his intellectual power. It was only the struggle 
that lay before him which revealed in the dry and subtle school- 
man the founder of our later English prose, a master of popular in- 
vective, of irony, of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious 
partisan, the organizer of a religious order, the unsparing assailant of 
abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of controversialists, the 
first Reformer who dared, when deserted and alone, to question and 
deny the creed of the Christendom around him, to break through the 
tradition of the past, and with his last breath to assert the freedom of 
religious thought against the dogmas of the Papacy. 

The attack of Wyclif began precisely at the moment when the 
Church of the middle ages had sunk to its lowest point of spiritual 
decay. The transfer of the Papacy to Avignon robbed it of much 
of the awe in which it had been held, for not only had the Popes sunk 
into creatures of the French King, but their greed and extortion pro- 
duced almost universal revolt. The claim of first fruits and annates 
from all ecclesiastical preferments, the assumption of a right to 
dispose of all benefices in ecclesiastical patronage, the imposition of 
direct taxes on the clergy, the intrusion of foreign priests into English 
livings and English sees, produced a fierce hatred and contempt of 
Rome which never slept till the Reformation. The people scorned a 
^ French Pope," and threatened his legates with stoning when they 
landed. The wit of Chaucer flouted the wallet of " pardons hot from 
Rome.'' Parliament vindicated the right of the State to prohibit the 
admission or execution of Papal bulls or briefs within the realm by the 
Statute of Praemunire, and denied the Papal claim to dispose of bene- 
fices by that of Provisors. But the failure of the effort showed the 
amazing power which Rome had acquired from the unquestioning 



Src. III. 

John 

WYCLir. 

1324?- 1361 



Bneland 
and the 
Papacy. 



Statutes of 

Praemunire 

and 

Provisors, 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CilAP. 



submission of so many ages. The Pope waived indeed his right to 
appoint foreigners ; but by a compromise, in which Pope and King 
combined for the enslaving of the Church, archbishoprics, bishoprics, 
abbacies, and the wealthier livings still continued to receive Papal 
nominees. The protest of the Good Parliament is a record of the ill- 
success of its predecessor's attempt. It asserted that the taxes levied 
by the Pope amounted to five times the amount of those levied by the 
King, that by reservation during the life of actual holders he disposed 
of the same bishopric four or five times over, receiving each time the 
first fruits. " The brokers of the sinful City of Rome promote for money 
unlearned and unworthy caitiffs to benefices of the value of a thousand 
marks, while the poor and learned hardly obtain one of twenty. So 
decays sound learning. They present aliens who neither see nor care 
to see their parishioners, despise God's services, convey away the 
treasure of the realm, and are worse than Jews or Saracens. The 
Pope's revenue from England alone is larger than that of any prince 
in Christendom. God gave his sheep to be pastured, not to be shaven 
and shorn." The grievances were no trifling ones. At this very time 
the deaneries of Lichfield, Salisbury, and York, the archdeaconry of 
Canterbury, which was reputed the wealthiest English benefice, toge- 
ther with a host of prebends and preferments, were held by Italian car- 
dinals and priests, while the Pope's collector from his office in London 
sent iwenty thousand marks a year to the Papal treasury. 

If extortion and tyranny such as this severed the English clergy 
from the Papacy, their own selfishness severed them from the nation at 
large. Immense as was their wealth, they bore as little as they could 
of the common burthens of the realm. The old quarrel over the civil 
jurisdiction still lingered on, and the mild punishments of the ecclesi- 
astical courts carried little dismay into the mass of disorderly clerks. 
Privileged as they were against all interference from the world without, 
the clergy penetrated by their control over wills, contracts, divorce, 
by the dues they exacted, as well as by directly religious offices, into 
the very heart of the social life around them. Thousands of sum- 
moners enforced their social jurisdiction, and there were few persons 
of substance who escaped the vexations of their courts. On the 
other hand, their moral authority was rapidly passing away ; the 
wealthiest churchmen, with curled hair and hanging sleeves, aped the 
costume of the knightly society to which they really belonged. We 
have already seen the general impression of their worldliness in 
Chaucer's picture of the hunting monk and the courtly prioress, with 
her love-motto on her brooch. Over the vice of the higher classes 
they exerted no influence whatever ; the King paraded his mistress as 
a Queen of Beauty through London, the nobles blazoned their infamy 
in court and tournament. " In those days," says a canon of the time, 
" -^rose a great rumour and clamour among the people, that wherever 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



231 



there was a tournament there came a great concourse of ladies of the 
most costly and beautiful, but not of the best in the kingdom, some- 
times forty or fifty in number, as if they were a part of the tournament, 
in diverse and wonderful male apparell, in parti-coloured tunics, with 
short caps and bands wound cord-wise round their head, and girdles 
bound with gold and silver, and daggers in pouches across their body, 
and then they proceeded on chosen coursers to the place of tourney, 
and so expended and wasted their goods and vexed their bodies with 
scurrilous wantonness that the rumour of the people sounded every- 
where ; and thus they neither feared God nor blushed at the chaste 
voice of the people." They were not called on to blush at the chaste 
voice of the Church. The clergy were in fact rent by their own dis- 
sensions. The higher prelates were busy with the cares of pohtical 
office, and severed from the lower priesthood by the scandalous 
inequality between the revenues of the wealthier ecclesiastics and the 
" poor parson " of the country. The older religious orders had sunk 
into mere landowners, while the enthusiasm of the Friars had utterly 
died away and left a crowd of impudent mendicants behind it. In 
Oxford itself a fierce schism had for some time divided the secular 
clergy, who now came to the front of the scholastic movement, from 
the regulars with whom it had begun. Fitz-Ralf, the Archbishop of 
Armagh, who had been its Chancellor, attributed to the Friars the 
decline in the number of academical students, and the University 
checked by statute their admission of mere children into their orders. 
Wyclif, at a later time, denounced them as sturdy beggars, and de 
clared formally that " the man who goes alone to a begging Friar is 
ipso facto excommunicate." 

Without the warning ranks of the clergy stood a world of earnest 
men who, like Piers the Ploughman, denounced their worldliness and 
vice, sceptics, like Chaucer, laughing at the jingling bells of their 
hunting-abbots, and the brutal and greedy baronage under John of 
Gaunt, eager to drive the prelates from office and to seize on their 
wealth. Worthless as the last party seems to us, it was with John of 
Gaunt that Wyclif allied himself in the first effort he made for the 
reform of the Church. As yet his quarrel was not with its doctrine, 
but with its practice : it was on the principles of Ockham that he 
defended the Parliament's indignant refusal of the " tribute '^ which 
was claimed by the Papacy, the expulsion of the bishops from office 
by the Duke of Lancaster, and the taxation of Church lands. But 
his treatise on " The Kingdom of God " (De DomJnio Divino) shows 
how different his aims really were from the selfish aims of the men 
with whom he acted. In this, the most famous of his works, Wyclif 
bases his action on a distinct ideal of society. All authority, to use 
his own expression, is " founded in Grace." Dominion in the highest 
sense is in God alone ; it is God who, as the suzerain of the universe. 



232 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



deals out His rule in fief to rulers in their various stations on tenure 
of their obedience to himself. It was easy to object that in such a 
case " dominion " could never exist, since mortal sin is a breach of 
such a tenure, and all men sin. But, as Wyclif urged it, the theory is 
a purely ideal one. In actual practice he distinguishes between 
dominion and power, power which the wicked may have by God's 
permission, and to which the Christian must submit from motives of 
obedience to God. In his own scholastic phrase, so strangely perverted 
afterwards, here on earth " God must obey the devil." But whether in 
the ideal or practical view of the matter, all power or dominion was of 
God. It was granted by Him not to one person, His Vicar on earth, 
as the Papacy alleged, but to all. The King was as truly God's Vicar 
as the Pope. The Royal power was as sacred as the ecclesiastical, 
and as complete over temporal things, even the temporahties of the 
Church, as that of the Church over spiritual things. On the question 
of Church and State therefore the distinction between the ideal and 
practical view was of little account. His application of the theory 
of " dominion " to the individual conscience was of far higher and 
wider importance. Obedient as each Christian might be to king or 
priest, he himself, as a possessor of " dominion," held immediately of 
God. The throne of God Himself was the tribunal of personal appeal. 
What the Reformers of the sixteenth century attempted to do by 
their theory of Justification by Faith, Wyclif attempted to do by 
his theory of " dominion." It was a theory which in establishing a 
direct relation between man and God swept away the whole basis of a 
mediating priesthood on which the mediaeval Church was built ; but 
for a time its real drift was hardly perceived. To Wyclifs theory of 
Church and State, his subjection of their temporalities to the Crown, 
his contention that like other property they might be seized and 
employed for national purposes, his wish for their voluntary abandon- 
ment and the return of the Church to its original poverty, the clergy 
were more sensitive. They were just writhing under the attack on 
Wykeham by the nobles when the treatise appeared, and in the prose- 
cution of Wyclif, who was regarded as the theological bulwark of the 
Lancastrian party, they resolved to return blow for blow. He was 
summoned before Bishop Courtenay of London to answer for his 
heretical propositions concerning the wealth of the Church. The 
Duke of Lancaster accepted the challenge as really given to himself, 
and stood by Wyclifs side in the Consistory Court at St. Paul's. But 
no trial took place. Fierce words passed between the nobles and the 
prelate ; the Duke himself was said to have threatened to drag Cour- 
tenay out of the church by the hair of his head, and at last the 
London populace, to whom John of Gaunt was hateful, burst in to 
their Bishop's rescue. Wyclifs life was saved with difficulty by the 
aid of the soldiery, but his influence seems to have been unshaken. 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



233 



Papal bulls, which had been procured by the bishops, directing the 
University to condemn and arrest him, only extorted a bold defiance. 
In a defence circulated widely through the kingdom and laid before 
parhament, WycHf broadly asserted that no man could be excommu- 
nicated by the Pope " unless he were first excommunicated by him- 
self." He denied the right of the Church to exact or defend temporal 
privileges by spiritual censures, declared that a Church might justly 
be deprived by the king or lay lords of its property for defect of duty, 
and defended the subjection of ecclesiastics to civil tribunals. Bold 
as the defiance was, it won him the support of the people and the 
crown. When he appeared at the close of the year in Lambeth 
Chapel to answer the Archbishop's summons, a message from the 
Court forbade the Bishop to proceed, and the Londoners broke in 
and dissolved the session. 

Wyclif was still working hand in hand with John of Gaunt in 
advocating his plans of ecclesiastical reform, when the great insur- 
rection of the peasants, which we shall soon have to describe, broke 
out under Wat Tyler. In a few months the whole of his work was 
undone. Not only was the power of the Lancastrian party on which 
Wyclif had relied for the moment annihilated, but the quarrel between 
the baronage and the Church, on which his action had hitherto beea 
grounded, was hushed in the presence of a common danger. Much of 
the odium of the outbreak too fell on the Reformer : the Friars 
charged him with being a " sower of strife, who by his serpent-like 
instigation has set the serf against his lord," and though Wyclif tossed 
back the charge with disdain, he had to bear a suspicion which 
was justified by the conduct of some of his followers. John Ball, who 
had figured in the front rank of the revolt, was claimed as one of his 
adherents, and was alleged to have denounced in his last hour the 
conspiracy of the *' Wycliffites.'' His most prominent scholar, Nicholas 
Herford, was said to have openly approved the brutal murder of 
Archbishop Sudbury. Whatever belief such charges might gain, it is 
certain that from this moment all plans for the reorganization of the 
Church were confounded in the general odium which attached to the 
projects of the socialist peasant leaders, and that any hope of ecclesias- 
tical reform at the hands of the baronage and the Parliament was at 
an end. But even if the Peasant Revolt had not deprived Wyclif of 
the support of the aristocratic party with whom he had hitherto co- 
operated, their alliance must have been dissolved by the new position 
which he had already taken up. Some months before the outbreak of 
the insurrection, he had by one memorable step passed from the posi- 
tion of a reformer of the discipline and political relations of the Church 
to that of a protestant against its cardinal beliefs. If there was one 
doctrine upon which the supremacy of the Mediseval Church rested, it 
was the doctrine of Transubstantiation. It was by his exclusive right 



234 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to the performance of the miracle which was wrought in the mass that 
the lowliest priest was raised high above princes. With the formal 
denial of the doctrine of Transubstantiation which Wyclif issued 
in the spring of 1381 began that great movement of revolt which 
ended, more than a century after, in the establishment of religious 
freedom, by severing the mass of the Teutonic peoples from the general 
body of the Catholic Church. The act was the bolder that he stood 
utterly alone. The University, in which his influence had been hitherto 
all-powerful, at once condemned him. John of Gaunt enjoined him 
to be silent. Wyclif was presiding as Doctor of Divinity over some 
disputations in the schools of the Augustinian Canons when his 
academical condemnation was publicly read, but though startled for the 
moment he at once challenged Chancellor or doctor to disprove the 
conclusions at which he had arrived. The prohibition of the Duke 
of Lancaster he met by an open avowal of his teaching, a confession 
which closes proudly with the quiet words, " I believe that in the end 
the truth will conquer." For the moment his courage dispelled the 
panic around him. The University responded to his appeal, and by 
displacing his opponents from office tacitly adopted his cause. But 
Wyclif no longer looked for support to the learned or wealthier 
classes on whom he had hitherto relied. He appealed, and the appeal 
is memorable as the first of such a kind in our history, to England 
at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after tract in the 
tongue of the people itself. The dry, syllogistic Latin, the abstruse 
and involved argument which the great doctor had addressed to his 
academic hearers, were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which 
marks the wonderful genius of the man the schoolman was trans- 
formed into the pamphleteer. If Chaucer is the father of our later 
English poetry, Wyclif is the father of our later English prose. The 
rough, clear, homely English of his tracts, the speech of the plough- 
man and the trader of the day, though coloured with the picturesque 
phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary use as distinctly a creation 
of his own as the style in which he embodied it, the terse vehement 
sentences, the stinging sarcasms, the hard antitheses which roused 
the dullest mind like a whip. Once fairly freed from the trammels 
of unquestioning belief, Wyclif s mind worked fast in its career of 
scepticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, pilgrimages to the 
shrines of the saints, worship of their images, worship of the saints 
themselves, were successively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible 
as the one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right 
of every instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened 
the very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. Nor were 
these daring denials confined to the small circle of the scholars 
who still clung to him ; with the practical ability which is so marked 
a feature of his character, Wyclif had organized, some few years 



I 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS'" WAR. 



235 



before, an order of poor preachers, "the Simple Priests,^' whose 
coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the laughter of the 
clergy, but who now formed a priceless organization for the diffu- 
sion of their master's doctrines. How rapid their progress must 
have been we may see from the panic-struck exaggerations of their 
opponents ; a few years later every second man you met, they 
complain, was a Lollard ; the followers of Wyclif abounded every- 
where and in all classes, among the baronage, in the cities, among the 
peasantry of the country-side, even in the monastic cell itself. 

" Lollard,^' a word which probably means much the same as " idle 
babbler,'' was the nickname of scorn with which the orthodox Church- 
men chose to insult their assailants. But this rapid increase changed 
their scorn into vigorous action. Courtenay, now become Archbishop, 
summoned a council at Blackfriars, and formally submitted twenty-four 
propositions drawn from Wyclif s works. An earthquake in the midst 
of the proceedings terrified every prelate but the resolute Primate ; the 
expulsion of ill humours from the earth, he said, was of good omen for 
the expulsion of ill humours from the Church ; and the condemnation 
was pronounced. Then the Archbishop turned fiercely upon Oxford 
as the fount and centre of the new heresies. In an English sermon at 
St. Frideswide's, Nicholas Herford had asserted the truth of Wyclil's 
doctrines, and Courtenay ordered the Chancellor to silence him and 
his adherents on pain of being himself treated as a heretic. The 
Chancellor fell back on the liberties of the University, and appointed 
as preacher another Wyclifftte, Repyngdon, who did not hesitate to 
style the Lollards "holy priests.'' and to afBrm that they were 
protected by John of Gaunt. Party spirit meanwhile ran high among 
the students ; the bulk of them sided with the Lollard leaders, and 
the Carmelite Peter Stokes, who had procured the Archbishop's 
letters, cowered panic-stricken in his chamber while the Chancellor, 
protected by an escort of a hundred townsmen, listened approvingly 
to Repyngdon's defiance. " I dare go no further," wrote the poor 
Friar to the Archbishop, " for fear of death ; " but he soon mustered 
courage to descend into the schools where Repyngdon was now 
maintaining that the clerical order was " better when it was but nine 
years old than now that it has grown to a thousand years and more." 
The appearance, however, of scholars in arms again drove Stokes to 
fly. in despair to Lambeth, while a new heretic in open Congregation 
maintained Wyclif s denial of Transubstantiation. " There is no 
idolatry/' cried William James, " save in the Sacrament of the Altar." 
" You speak like a wise man," replied the Chancellor, Robert Rygge. 
Courtenay however was not the man to bear defiance tamely, and his 
summons to Lambeth wrested a submission from Rygge which was 
only accepted on his pledge to suppress the Lollardism of the 
University. " I dare not publish them, on fear of death," exclaimed 



236 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the Chancellor when Chichele handed him his letters of condemnation. 
" Then is your University an open fautor of heretics," retorted the 
Primate, " if it suffers not the Catholic truth to be proclaimed within 
its bounds." The royal council supported the Archbishop's injunc- 
tion, but the publication of the decrees at once set Oxford on fire. 
The scholars threatened death against the Friars, " crying that they 
wished to destroy the University.^' The masters suspended Henry 
Crump from teaching, as a troubler of the public peace, for calling 
the Lollards "heretics." The Crown however at last stepped roughly 
in to Courtenay's aid, and a royal writ ordered the instant banishment 
of all favourers of Wyclif, with the seizure and destruction of all 
Lollard books, on pain of forfeiture of the University's privileges. 
The threat produced its effect. Herford and Rep}Tigdon appealed in 
vain to John of Gaunt for protection ; the Duke himself denounced 
them as heretics against the Sacrament of the Altar, and after much 
evasion they were forced to make a formal submission. Within Oxford 
itself the suppression of Lollardism was complete, but with the death 
of religious freedom all trace of intellectual life suddenly disappears. 
The century which followed the triumphs of Courtenay is the most 
barren in its annals, nor was the sleep of the University broken till 
the advent of the New Learning restored to it some of the life and 
liberty which the Primate had so roughly trodden out. 

Nothing marks more strongly the grandeur of Wyclif s position as 
the last of the great schoolmen, than the reluctance of so bold a man 
as Courtenay even after his triumph over Oxford to take extreme 
measures against the head of Lollardry. Wyclif, though summoned, 
had made no appearance before the " Council of the Earthquake." 
" Pontius Pilate and Herod are made friends to-day," was his bitter 
comment on the new union which it proved to have sprung up between 
the prelates and the monastic orders who had so long been at variance 
with each other ; " since they have made a heretic of Christ, it is 
an easy inference for thern to count simple Christians heretics." He 
seems indeed to have been sick at the moment, but the announcement 
of the final sentence roused him to life again. " I shall not die," he 
is said to have cried at an earlier time when in grievous peril, " but 
live and declare the works of the Friars." He petitioned the King and 
Parliament that he might be allowed freely to prove the doctrines he 
had put forth, and turning with characteristic energy to the attack 
of his assailants, he asked that all religious vows might be suppressed, 
that tithes might be diverted to the maintenance of the poor and the 
clergy maintained by the free alms of their flocks, that the Statutes 
of Provisors and Prsemunire might be enforced against the Papacy 
that Churchmen might be declared incapable of secular offices, and 
imprisonment for excommunication cease. Finally, in the teeth of the 
council's condemnation, he demanded that th? doctrine of the Eucha- 



II 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



237 



rist which he advocated might be freely taught. If he appeared in 
the following year before the Convocation at Oxford, it was to perplex 
his opponents by a display of scholastic logic which permitted him 
to retire without any retractation of his sacramental heresy. For the 
time his opponents seemed satisfied with his expulsion from the 
University, but in his retirement at Lutterworth he was forging during 
these troubled years the great weapon which, wielded by other hands 
than his own, was to produce so terrible an effect on the triumphant 
hierarchy. An earlier translation of the whole Bible, in part of which 
he was aided by his scholar Herford, was being revised and brought to 
the second form, which is better known as " Wyclif s Bible," when 
death drew near. The appeal of the prelates to Rome was answered 
at last by a Brief ordering him to appear at the Papal Court. His 
failing strength exhausted itself in the cold sarcastic reply which ex- 
plained that his refusal to comply with the summons simply sprang 
from broken health. " I am always glad," ran the ironical answer, 
*^to explain my faith to any one, and above all to the Bishop of 
Rome ; for I take it for granted that if it be orthodox he will confirm 
it, if it be erroneous he will correct it. I assume, too, that as chief 
Vicar of Christ upon earth the Bishop of Rome is of all mortal men 
most bound to the law of Christ's Gospel, for among the disciples 
dl Christ a majority is not reckoned by simply counting heads in the 
fashion of this world, but according to the imitation of Christ on 
either side. Now Christ during His life upon earth was of all men 
the poorest, casting from Him all worldly authority. I deduce from 
these premisses, as a simple counsel of my own, that the Pope 
should surrender all temporal authority to the civil power and advise 
his clergy to do the same." The boldness of his words sprang 
perhaps from a knowledge that his end was near. The terrible strain 
on energies enfeebled by age and study had at last brought its inevitable 
result, and a stroke of paralysis while Wyclif was hearing mass in his 
parish church of Lutterworth was followed on the next day by his 
quiet death. 

Section IV.— The Peasant Revolt, 1377— 1331* 

\Authorities. — For the condition of land and labour at this time see the 
" History of Prices," by Professor Thorold Rogers, the "Domesday Book of 
St. Paul's " (Camden Society) with Archdeacon Hale's valuable introduction, 
and Mr. Seebohm's ** Essays on the Black Death " {Fortnightly Review^ 1865). 
Among the chroniclers Knyghton and Walsingham are the fiillest and most 
valuable. The great Labour Statutes will be found in the Parliamentary 
Rolls.] 

The religious revolution which we have been describing gave fresh 
impulse to a revolution of even greater importance, which had for a 
long time been changing the whole face of the country. The manorial j 



238 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



system, on which the social organization of every rural part of Eng- 
land rested, had divided the land, for the purposes of cultivation and 
of internal order, into a number of large estates ; in each of which 
about a fourth of the soil was usually retained by the owner of the 
manor as his demesne or home-farm, while the remainder was dis- 
tributed, at the period we have reached, among tenants who were bound 
to render service to their lord. We know hardly anything of the 
gradual process by which these tenants had arisen out of the slave 
class who tilled the lands of the first English settlers. The slave, 
indeed, still remained, though the number of pure "serfs" bore a 
small proportion to the other cultivators of the soil. He was still, 
in the strictest sense, his lord's property ; he was bound to the soil, 
he paid head-money for licence to remove from the estate in search of 
trade or hire, and a refusal to return on recal by his owner would have 
ended in his pursuit as a fugitive outlaw. But even this class had 
now acquired definite rights of its own ; and although we still find 
instances of the sale of serfs " with their litter," or family, apart from 
the land they tilled, yet, in the bulk of cases, the amount of service due 
from the serf had become limited by custom, and, on its due render- 
ing, his holding was practically as secure as that of the freest tenant 
on the estate. But at a time earlier than any record we possess the 
mass of the agricultural population had risen to a position of far 
greater independence than this, and now formed a class of peasant 
proprietors, inferior indeed to the older Teutonic freeman, but far 
removed from the original serf. Not only had their service and the 
time of rendering it become limited by custom, not only had the 
possession of each man's little hut with the plot around it, and the 
privilege of turning out a few cattle on the waste of the manor, passed 
from mere indulgences granted and withdrawn at a lord's caprice 
into rights which could be pleaded at law, but the class as a whole 
were no longer "in the power of the lord." The claim of the pro- 
prietors over peasants of this kind ended with the due rendering of 
their service in the cultivation of his demesne, and this service might 
be rendered either personally or by deputy. It was the nature and 
extent of this labour-rent which determined the rank of the tenants 
among themselves. The villain, or free tenant, for instance, was 
only bound to gather in his lord's harvest and to aid in the ploughing 
and sowing of autumn and Lent, while the cottar, the bordar, and 
the labourer were bound to aid in the work of the home-farm through- 
out the year. The cultivation, indeed, of the home-farm, or as it was 
then called, the demesne, rested wholly with the tenants ; it was by them 
that the great grange of the Lord was filled with sheaves, his sheep 
sheared, his grain malted, the wood hewn for his hall fire. The extent 
of these services rested wholly on tradition, but the number of teams, 
the fines, the reliefs, the heriots which the lord could claim was, at thi^ 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



239 



time, generally entered on the court-roll of the manor, a copy of which 
became the title-deed of the tenants, and gave them the name of copy- 
holders, by whkh they became known at a later period. Disputes were 
easily settled by the steward of the manor on refeience to this roll or 
on oral evidence of the custom at issue, but a social arrangement, 
eminently characteristic of the English spirit of compromise, generally 
secured a fair adjustment of the claims of employer and employed. It 
was the duty of the lord's baihff to exact their dues from the tenantry, 
but his coadjutor in this office, the reeve or foreman of the manor, was 
chosen by the tenants themselves, and acted as the representative of 
their interests and their rights. 

The first disturbance of the system of tenure which we have 
described sprang from the introduction of leases. The lord of the 
manor, instead of cultivating the demesne through his own bailiff, often 
found it more convenient and profitable to let the manor to a tenant 
at a given rent, payable either in money or in kind. Thus we find 
the manor of Sandon leased by the Chapter of St. PauFs at a very 
early period on a rent which comprised the payment of grain both for 
bread and ale, of alms to be distributed at the cathedral door, of wood 
to be used in its bakehouse and brewery, and of money to be spent 
in wages. It is to this system of leasing, or rather to the usual 
term for the rent it entailed (feorm, from the Latin Jirma), that we 
owe the words "farm" and "farmer," the growing use of which 
from the twelfth century marks the first step in the rural revolution 
which we are examining. It was a revolution which made little 
direct change in the manorial syi^tem, but its indirect effect in break- 
ing the tie on which the feudal organization of the manor rested, 
that of the tenant's personal dependence on his lord, and in affording 
an opportunity by which the wealthier among the tenantry could rise 
to a position of apparent equality with their older masters, was of the 
highest importance. This earlier step, however, in the modification 
of the manorial system, by the rise of the Farmer-class, was soon 
followed by one of a far more serious character in the rise of the Free 
Labourer. Labour, whatever right it might have attained in other 
ways, was as yet in the strictest sense bound to the soil. Neither 
villain nor serf had any choice, either of a master or of a sphere of 
toil. The tenant was born, in fact, to his holding and to his lord. 
But the advance of society and the natural increase of population 
had for a long time been silently freeing the labourer from this local 
bondage. The influence of the Church had been exerted in promoting 
emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own. The 
fugitive bondsmen found freedom in a flight to chartered towns, 
where a residence during a year and a day conferred franchise. The 
increase of population had a far more serious effect. The numbers 
of the English people seem to have all but tripled since the Conquest, 



240 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPL E, 



LChap. 



and as the law of gavel-kind, which was applicable] to all landed 
estates not held by military tenure, divided the inhew'itance of the 
tenantry equally among their sons, the holding of e?ach tenant and 
the services due from it became divided in a corresf )onding degree. 
The labour-rent thus became more difficult to enfoirce, at the very 
time when the increase of wealth among the tenantry/ and the rise of 
a new spirit of independence made it more burthenso?me to those who 
rendered it. It was probably from this cause that the commutation 
of the arrears of labour for a money payment, which had long pre- 
vailed on every estate, gradually developed into, a general com- 
mutation of services. We have already witnessed, the silent progress 
of this remarkable change in the case of St. Ed^mondsbury, but the 
practice soon became universal, and " malt-silver,'/' " wood-silver," and 
"larder silver " were gradually taking the place (6f the older personal 
services on the court-rolls, at the opening of the fourteenth century. 
Under the Edwards the process of commutation was hastened by 
the necessities of the lords themselves. The luxury of the time, the 
splendour and pomp of chivalry, the cost of incessant campaigns, 
drained the purses of knight and baron, and the sale of freedom to 
the serf or exemption from services to the villain afforded an easy 
and tempting mode of refilHng them. In this process Edward the 
Third him^self led the way : commissioners were sent to royal estates 
for the especial purpose of selling manumissions to the King's serfs ; 
and we still possess the names of those who were enfranchised with 
their families by a payment of hard cash in aid of the exhausted 
exchequer. 

By this entire detachment of the serf from actual dependence on the 
land, the manorial system was even more radically changed than by 
the rise of the serf into a copyholder. The whole social condition 
of the country, in fact, was modified by the appearance of a new class. 
The rise of the free labourer had followed that of the farmer, labour 
was no longer bound to one spot or one master : it was free to hire 
itself to what employer, and to choose w^hat field of employment it 
would. At the close of Edward's reign, in fact, the lord of a manor 
had been reduced over a large part of England to the position 
of a modern landlord, receiving a rental in money from his tenants, 
and dependent for the cultivation of his own demesne on hired 
labour ; while the wealthier of the tenants themselves often took 
the demesne on lease as its farmers, and thus created a new class 
intermediate between the larger proprietors and the customary 
tenants. The impulse towards a wider liberty given by the exten- 
sion of this process of social change was soon seen on the appear- 
ance for the first time in our history of a spirit of social revolt. A 
Parliamentary statute of this period tells us that "villains and 
tenants of lands in villainage withdrew their customs and services 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' IVAR, 



241 



from their lords, having attached themselves to other persons who 
maintained and abetted them ; and who, under colour of exempli- 
fications from Domesday of the manors and villas where they 
dwelt, claimed to be quit of all manner of services, either of their 
body or of their lands, and would suffer no distress or other course 
of justice to be taken against them ; the villains aiding their main- 
tainers by threatening the officers of their lords with peril to 
life and limb, as well by open assemblies as by confederacies to 
support each other." The copyholder was struggling to become a 
freeholder, and the farmer (perhaps) to be recognized as proprietor of 
the demesne which he held on lease. It was while this struggle 
was growing in intensity that a yet more formidable difficulty met 
the lords who had been driven by the enfranchisement of their 
serfs to rely on hired labour. Everything depended on the abundant 
supply of free labourers, and this abundance suddenly disappeared. 
The most terrible plague which the world ever witnessed advanced 
at this juncture from the East, and after devastating Europe from 
the shores of the Mediterranean to the Baltic, swooped at the close 
of 1348 upon Britain. The traditions of its destructiveness, and 
the panic-struck words of the statutes which followed it, have 
been more than justified by modern research. Of the three or 
four millions who then formed the population of England, more 
than one-half were swept away in its repeated visitations. Its 
ravages were fiercest in the greater towns, where filthy and undrained 
streets afforded a constant haunt to leprosy and fever. In the 
burial ground which the piety of Sir Walter Manny purchased for 
the citizens of London, a spot whose site was afterwards marked 
by the Charter House, more than fifty thousand corpses are said to 
have been interred. Nearly sixty thousand people perished at Norwich, 
while in Bristol the living were hardly able to bury the dead. But 
the Black Death fell on the village almost as fiercely as on the town. 
More than one-half of the priests of Yorkshire are known to have 
perished ; in the diocese of Norwich two-thirds of the parishes were 
left without incumbents. The whole organizs,tion of labour was 
thrown out of gear. The scarcity of hands made it difficult for 
the minor tenants to perform the services due for their lands, and 
only a temporary abandonment of half the rent by the landowners 
induced the farmers to refrain from the abandonment of their farms. 
For the time cultivation became impossible. " The sheep and cattle 
strayed through the fields and corn," says a contemporary, " and there 
were none left who could drive them." Even when the first burst 
of panic was over, the sudden rise of wages consequent on the enor- 
mous diminution in the supply of free labour, though accompanied 
by a corresponding rise in the price of food, rudely disturbed the 
\course of industrial employments ; harvests rotted on the groundj 



242 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



and fields were left untilled, not merely from scarcity of hands, but 
from the strife which now for the first time revealed itself between 
Capital and Labour. 

While the landowners of the country and the wealthier craftsmen 
of the town were threatened with ruin by what seemed to their age the 
extravagant demands of the new labour class, the country itself was torn 
with riot and disorder. The outbreak of lawless self-indulgence which 
followed everywhere in the wake of the plague told especially upon 
the " landless men," wandering in search of work, and for the first 
time masters of the labour market ; and the wandering labourer or 
artisan turned easily into the " sturdy beggar," or the bandit of the 
woods. A summary redress for these evils was found by the Parlia- 
ment and the Crown in a royal ordinance which was subsequently 
embodied in the Statute of Labourers. " Every man or woman," runs 
this famous Act, " of whatsoever condition, free or bond, able in body, 
and within the age of threescore years, . . . and not having of his own 
whereof he may live, nor land of his own about the tillage of which 
he may occupy himself, and not serving any other, shall be bound to 
serve the employer who shall require him to do so, and shall take only 
the wages which were accustomed to be taken in the neighbourhood 
where he is bound to serve" two years before the plague began. A 
refusal to obey was punished by imprisonment. Sterner measures 
were soon found to be necessary. Not only was the price of labour 
fixed by the Parliament of 1350, but the labour class was once more 
tied to the soil. The labourer was forbidden to quit the parish where 
he lived in search of better-paid employment; if he disobeyed he 
became a ** fugitive," and subject to imprisonment at the hands of the 
justices of the peace. To enforce such a law literally must have been 
impossible, for corn had risen to so high a price that a da/s labour 
at the old wages would not have purchased wheat enough for a man's 
support. But the landowners did not flinch from the attempt. The 
repeated re-enactment of the law shows the difficulty of applying it 
and the stubbornness of the struggle which it brought about. The 
fines and forfeitures which were levied for infractions of its pro- 
visions formed a large source of royal revenue, but so ineffectual 
were the original penalties that the runaway labourer was at last 
ordered to be branded with a hot iron on the forehead, while the 
harbouring of serfs in towns was rigorously put down. Nor was it 
merely the existing class of free labourers which was attacked by this 
reactionary movement. Not only was the process of emancipation sud- 
denly checked, but the ingenuity of the lawyers, who were employed 
as stewards of each manor, was recklessly exercised in cancelling 
on grounds of informality manumissions and exemptions which 
had passed without question, and in bringing back the villain and 
( the serf into a bondage from which they held themselves freed. The 



i 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



243 



attempt was the more galling that the cause had to be pleaded in the 
manor-court itself, and to be decided by the very officer whose interest 
it was to give judgment in favour of his lord. We can see the growth 
of a fierce spirit of resistance through the statutes which strove in 
vain to repress it. In the towns, where the system of forced labour 
was applied with even more rigour than in the country, strikes and 
combinations became frequent among the lower craftsmen. In the 
country the free labourers found allies in the villains whose freedom 
from manorial service was questioned, and throughout Kent and the 
eastern counties the gatherings of " fugitive serfs " were supported by 
an organized resistance and by large contributions of money on the 
part of the wealthier tenantry. The cry of the poor found a terrible 
utterance in the words of "a mad priest of Kent,^' as the courtly 
Froissart calls him, who had for twenty years been preaching a 
LoUardry of coarser and more popular type than that of Wyclif, and 
who found audience for his sermons in defiance of interdict and im- 
prisonment in the stout yeomen who gathered in the Kentish church- 
yards. " Mad'' as the landowners called him, it was in the preaching 
of John Ball that England first listened to the knell of feudalism and 
the declaration of the rights of man. " Good people,'' cried the 
preacher, "things will never go well in England so long as goods 
be not in common, and so long as there be villains and gentlemen. 
By what right are they whom we call lords greater folk than we.^ 
On what grounds have they deserved it ? Why do they hold us in 
serfage ? If we all came of the same father and mother, of Adam 
and Eve, how can they say or prove that they are better than we, 
if it be not that they make us gain for them by our toil what they 
spend in their pride ? They are clothed in velvet, and warm in their 
furs and their ermines, while we are covered with rags. They have 
wine and spices and fair bread ; and we oat-cake and straw, and 
water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses ; we have pain 
and labour, the rain and the wind in the fields. And yet it is of 
us and of our toil that these men hold their state." It was the 
tyranny of property that then as ever roused the defiance of social- 
ism. A spirit fatal to the whole system of the Middle Ages breathed 
in the popular rhyme which condensed the levelling doctrine of 
John Ball : " When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the 
gentleman ? '^ 

The rhyme was running from lip to lip when a fresh instance of 
public oppression fanned the smouldering discontent into a flame. 
Edward the Third died in a dishonoured old age, robbed on his 
death-bed even of his finger-rings by the vile mistress to whom he had 
clung, and the accession of the child of the Black Prince, Richard 
the Second, revived the hopes of what in a political sense we must 
still call the popular party in the Legislature. The Parliament of 1377 

R 2 



^H 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



resumed its work of reform, and boldly assumed the control of the 
expenditure by means of a standing committee of two burgesses 
of London : that of 1378 demanded and obtained an account of the 
mode in which its subsidies had been spent. But the real strength 
of these assemblies was directed, as we have seen, to the desperate 
struggle in which the proprietary classes, whom they exclusively repre- 
sented, were striving to reduce the labourer into a fresh serfage. 
Meanwhile the shame of defeat abroad was added to the misery 
and discord at home. The French war ran its disastrous course : 
one English fleet was beaten by the Spaniards, a second sunk by a 
storm ; and a campaign in the heart of France ended, like its pre^ 
decessors, in disappointment and ruin. It was to defray the cost of 
these failures that the Parliament granted a fresh subsidy, to be 
raised by means of a poll-tax on every person in the realm. To such 
a tax the poorest man contributed as large a sum as the wealthiest, 
and the gross injustice of such an exaction set England on fire from 
sea to sea. In the eastern counties its levy gathered crowds of 
peasants together, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows; the 
royal commissioners sent to repress the tumult were driven from the 
field, and a party of insurgents in Essex gave the signal for open 
revolt by crossing the Thames under Jack Straw and calling Kent to 
arms. Canterbury, where " the whole town was of their sort,'" threw 
open its gates, plundered the Archbishop's palace, and dragged John 
Ball from its prison, while a hundred thousand Kentish-men gathered 
round Wat Tyler, a soldier who had served in the French wars, and 
who was at once recognized as the head of the insurrection. Quaint 
rhymes passed through the country, and served as summons to the 
revolt, which soon extended from the eastern and midland counties 
over all England south of the Thames. "John Ball," ran one, 
"greeteth you all, and doth for to understand he hath rung your 
bell. Now right and might, will and skill, God speed every dele." 
" Help truth," ran another, " and truth shall help you ! Now 
reigneth pride in price, and covetise is counted wise, and lechery 
withouten shame, and gluttony withouten blame. Envy reigneth 
with treason, and sloth is take in great season. God do bote, for 
now is tyme ! " We recognize BalFs hand in the yet more stirring 
missives of "Jack the Miller" and "Jack the Carter." "Jack Miller 
asketh help to turn his mill aright. He hath grounden small, small : 
the King's Son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy mill go 
aright with the four sailes, and the post stand with steadfastness. 
With right and with might, with skill and with will ; let might 
help right, and skill go before will, and right before might, so goeth 
our mill aright." " Jack Carter," ran the companion missive, " prays 
you all that ye make a good end of that ye have begun, and do 
I well; and aye better and better : for at the even men heareth the 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



245 



day." " Falseness and guile," sang Jack Trewman, " have reigned too 
long, and truth hath been set under a lock, and falseness and guile 
reigneth in every stock. No man may come truth to, but if he sing 
< si dedero.' True love is away that was so good, and clerks for 
wealth work them woe. God do bote, for now is tyme." In the rude 
jingle of these lines began for England the literature of political 
controversy : they are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of 
Milton and of Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough 
the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants : their 
longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice ; their scorn of the 
immorality of the nobles and the infamy of the court; their resentment 
at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression. The revolt 
spread like wildfire over the country : Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridge 
and Hertfordshire rose in arms : from Sussex and Surrey the insurrec- 
tion extended as far as Winchester and Somerset. But the strength 
of the rising lay in the Kentish-men, who were marching on London. 
As they poured on to Blackheath, every lawyer who fell into their 
hands was put to death ; " not till all these were killed would the land 
eiijoy its old freedom again," the peasants shouted as they fired the 
houses of the stewards and flung the records of the manor-courts into 
the flames. The whole population joined them as they marched 
along, while the nobles were paralyzed with fear, and the Duke of 
Lancaster fled before the popular hatred over the border, and took 
refuge in Scotland. The young King — he was but a boy of sixteen — 
addressed them from a boat on the river ; but the refusal of his 
Council under the guidance of Archbishop Sudbury to allow him to 
land kindled the peasants to fury, and with cries of "Treason" 
the great mass rushed on London. Its gates were flung open by 
the poorer artisans within the city, and the stately palace of John 
of Gaunt at the Savoy, the new inn of the lawyers at the Temple, 
the houses of the foreign merchants, were soon in a blaze. But the 
insurgents, as they proudly boasted, were "seekers of truth and 
justice, not thieves or robbers," and a plunderer found carrying off 
a silver vessel from the sack of the Savoy was flung with his spoil 
into the flames. The general terror was shown ludicrously enough on 
the following day, when a daring band of peasants, under Tyler him- 
self, forced their way into the Tower, and taking the panic-stricken 
knights of the garrison in rough horse-play by the beard, promised 
to be their equals and good comrades in the time to come. But the 
horse-play changed into dreadful earnest when Archbishop Sudbury 
and some of the ministers who had hindered the King from a con- 
ference with the peasants were discovered in the chapel ; the primate 
was dragged from his sanctuary and beheaded on Tower Hill, and 
the same vengeance was wreaked on the treasurer and the chief com- 
missioner in the levy of the hated poll-tax. Meanwhile the King 



246 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap/ 



found the mass of the peasants waiting for a conference with him 
v/ithout the city at Mile-End. "I am your King and Lord, good 
people," the boy began with a fearlessness which marked his whole 
bearing throughout the crisis ; " what will ye ? " " We will that you 
free us for ever," shouted the peasants, " us and our lands ; and 
that we be never named nor held for serfs." ^^ I grant it," replied 
Richard; and he bade them go home, pledging himself at once to 
issue charters of freedom and amnesty. A shout of joy welcomed 
the promise. Throughout the day more than thirty clerks were 
busied writing letters of pardon and emancipation, and with these 
the mass of the insurgents dispersed quietly to their homes. It 
was with such a charter that William Grindecobbe returned to St. 
Albans, and breaking at the head of the townsmen into the abbey 
precincts, summoned the abbot to deliver up the charters which 
bound the town in serfage to his house. But a more striking proof of 
its servitude remained in the millstones, which after a long suit at 
law had been surrendered to the abbey, and placed within its cloister 
as a triumphant witness that no burgess held the right of grinding 
corn within the bounds of its domain. The men of St. Albans now 
burst the cloister gates, and tearing the millstones from the floor, 
broke them into small pieces, " like blessed bread in church,'^ so that 
each might have something to show of the day when their freedom 
was won again. 

Thirty thousand peasants, however, still remained with W~at Tyler 
to watch over the fulfilment of the royal pledge, and it was this body 
which Richard by a mere chance encountered the next morning at 
Smithfield. Hot words passed between his train and the peasant leader, 
who had advanced to a fresh conference with the King ; and a threat 
brought on a brief scuffle in which the Mayor of London, William 
Walworth, struck Tyler with his dagger to the ground. " Kill, kill," 
shouted the crowd, " they have killed our Captain." " What need ye, 
my masters?" cried the boy King, as he rode boldly to the front, ^\\ 
am your Captain and your King ! Follow me." The hopes of the 
peasants centred in the young sovereign : one object of their rising 
had been to free him from the evil counsellors who, as they believed, 
abused his youth, and they now followed him with a touching loyalty 
and trust to the Tower. His mother welcomed him with tears of joy. 
"Rejoice and praise God," the boy answered, "for I have recovered 
to-day my heritage which was lost, and the realm of England." 
The panic of the nobles had in fact passed away, and six thousand 
knights gathered round the King, eager for blood, but Richard was 
as yet true to his word ; he contented himself with issuing the 
promised letters of freedom and dismissing the peasants to their 
homes. The revolt, indeed, was far from being at an end. A 
strong body of peasants occupied St. Albans. In the eastern 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



247 



counties fifty thousand men forced the gates of St. Edmundsbury 
and wrested from the trembling monks a charter of enfranchisement 
for the town. Littester, a dyer of Norwich, headed a strong mass of 
peasants, under the title of the King of the Commons, and compelled I 
the nobles he captured to act as his meat-tasters and to serve him on 1 
their knees during his repast. But the death of Tyler gave courage 
to the nobles, while it seems to have robbed the action of the 
peasants of all concert and decision. The warlike Bishop of Norwich 
fell lance in hand on the rebel camp in his own diocese, and scattered 
them at the first shock : while the King, with an army of 40,000 men, 
spread terror by the ruthlessness of his executions as he marched 
in triumph through Kent and Essex. But the stubbornness of the 
resistance which he met showed the temper of the people. The 
villagers of Billericay demanded from the King the same liberties as 
their lords, and on his refusal threw themselves into the woods and 
fought two hard fights before they were reduced to submission. It 
was only by threats of death that verdicts of guilty could be wrung 
from the Essex jurors when the leaders of the revolt were brought 
before them. Grindecobbe was offered his life if he would persuade 
his followers at St. Albans to restore the charters they had wrung 
from the monks. He turned bravely to his fellow-townsmen and bade 
them take no thought for his trouble. " If I die,'' he said, " I shall die 
for the cause of the freedom we have won, counting myself happy to 
end my life by such a martyrdom. Do then to-day as you would have 
done had I been killed yesterday." But the stubborn will of the con- 
quered was met by as stubborn a will in their conquerors. The royal ' 
council indeed showed its sense of the danger of a mere policy of 
resistance by submitting the question of enfranchisement to the Parlia- 
ment which assembled on the suppression of the revolt with w^ords 
which suggested a compromise. " If you desire to enfranchise and 
set at liberty the said serfs," ran the royal message, "by your 
common assent, as the King has been informed that some of you 
desire, he will consent to your prayer." But no thoughts of com- 
promise influenced the landowners in their reply. The King's grant 
and letters, the Parliament answered with perfect truth, were legally 
null and void : their serfs were their goods, and the King could not 
take their goods from them but by their own consent. " And this 
consent," they ended, " we have never given and never will give, were 
vre all to die in one day." 



248 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Section v.— Ricliard the Second; 1381—1399. 

^Authorities. — The ** AnnalesRicardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, '* published 
by the Master of the Rolls (in * * Trokelowe et Anon. Chronica") form the basis 
for this period of the St. Albans compilation which passes under the name of 
Walsingham, and from which the Life of Richard by the Monk of Evesham 
is for the most part derived. The same violent Lancastrian sympathy runs 
through Walsingham and the fifth book of Knyghton's Chronicle, a work 
which we probably owe, not to Knyghton himself, but to a contemporary 
canon of Leicester. The French authorities, on the other hand, are vehemently 
on Richard's side. Froissart, who ends at this time, is supplemented by the metri- 
cal history of Creton (in Archaeologia, vol. xx.) and the ** Chroniquede laTrai- 
son et Mort de Richard " (English Historical Society), both the works of French 
authors, and published in France in the time of Henry the Fourth, probably 
with the aim of arousing French feeling against the policy of invasion which 
had been revived by the House of Lancaster. For the popular feeling in 
England we may consult Mr. Wright's " Political Songs from Edward III. to 
Richard III." (Master of Rolls' Series). The Foedera and Rolls of Parlia- 
ment are indispensable for this period : its constitutional importance has been 
ably illustrated by Mr. Hallam ("Middle Ages"). The poem of William 
Longland, the "Complaint of Piers the Ploughman" (admirably edited by 
Mr. Skeat for the Early English Text Society), throws a flood of light on 
the social condition of England at the time ; we owe to the same author a 
poem on **The Deposition of Richard IL," which has been published by the 
Camden Society. The best modem work on Richard the Second is that of M. 
WalloK(** Richard IL" Paris, 1864). 



All the dairker and sterner aspects of the age which we have been 
viewing, its social revolt, its moral and religious awakening, the misery 
of the peasant, the protest of the Lollard, are painted with a terrible 
fidelity in the poem of William Longland. Nothing brings more 
vividly home to us the social chasm which in the fourteenth century 
severed the rich from the poor than the contrast between the " Com- 
plaint <)i Piers the Ploughman " and the " Canterbury Tales." The 
world of wealth and ease and laughter through which the courtly 
Chaucer moves with eyes downcast as in a pleasant dream is a far-off 
world of wrong and of ungodliness to the gaunt poet of the poor. Born 
probably in Shropshire, where he had been put to school and received 
minor orders as a clerk, " Long Will," as Longland was nicknamed 
for his tall stature, found his way at an early age to London, and 
earned a miserable livelihood there by singing placebos and diriges in 
the stately funerals of his day. Men took the silent moody clerk for 
a madman ; his bitter poverty quickened the defiant pride that made 
him loth — as he tells us — to bow to the gay lords and dames who rode 
decked in silver and minivere along the Cheap, or to exchange a 
" God save you " with the law Serjeants as he passed their new house in 
the Temple. His world is the world of the poor : he dwells on the poor 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



249 



man^s life, on his hunger and toil, his rough revelry and his despair 
with the narrow intensity of a man who has no outlook beyond it. 
The narrowness, the misery, the monotony of the life he paints reflect 
themselves in his verse. It is only here and there that a love of 
nature or a grim earnestness of wrath quicken his rhyme into 
poetry ; there is not a gleam of the bright human sympathy of 
Chaucer, of his fresh delight in the gaiety, the tenderness, the daring 
of the world about him, of his picturesque sense of even its coarsest 
contrasts, of his delicate irony, of his courtly wit. The cumbrous 
allegory, the tedious platitudes, the rhymed texts from Scripture which 
form the staple of Longland's work, are only broken here and there by 
phrases of a shrewd common sense, by bitter outbursts, by pictures of 
a broad Hogarthian humour. What chains one to the poem is its 
deep undertone of sadness : the world is out of joint and the gaunt 
rhymer who stalks silently along the Strand has no faith in his power 
to put it right. His poem covers indeed an age of shame and 
suffering such as England had never known, for if its first brief sketch 
appeared two years after the Peace of Bretigny its completion may 
be dated at the close of the reign of Edward the Third, and its final 
issue preceded but by a single year the Peasant Revolt. Londoner as 
he is, Will's fancy flies far from the sin and suffering of the great city to 
a May-morning in the Malvern Hills. " I was very forwandered and 
went me to rest under a broad bank by a burn side, and as I lay and 
leaned and looked in the water I slumbered in a sleeping, it sweyved 
(sounded) so merry.'' Just as Chaucer gathers the typical figures of 
the world he saw into his pilgrim train, so the dreamer gathers into a 
wide field his army of traders and chafferers, of hermits and solitaries, 
of minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen 
that " in setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims 
" with their wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bond- 
man, lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and par- 
doners " parting the silver " with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage 
is not to Canterbury, but to Truth ; their guide to Truth neither clerk 
nor priest but Peterkin the Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in 
his field. He it is who bids the knight no more wrest gifts from his 
tenant nor misdo with the poor. " Though he be thine underling 
here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set and with 
more bliss than thou. . . . For in charnel at church churles be 
evil to know, or a knight from a knave there." The gospel of equality 
is backed by the gospel of labour. The aim of the Ploughman 
is to work, and to make the world work with him. He warns the 
labourer as he warns the knight. Hunger is God's instrument in 
bringing the idlest to toil, and Hunger waits to work her will on the 
idler and the waster. On the eve of the great struggle between wealth 
and labour, Longland stands alone in his fairness to both, in his shrew<^ 



250 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



political and religious common sense. In the face of the popular hatred 
towards John of Gaunt, he paints the Duke in a famous apologue as 
the cat who, greedy as she might be, at any rate keeps the noble rats 
from utterly devouring the mice of the people. The poet is loyal 
to the Church, but his pilgrimage is not to Walsingham, but to Truth ; 
he proclaims a righteous life to be better than a host of indulgences, 
and God sends His pardon to Piers when priests dispute it. But he 
sings as a man conscious of his loneliness and without hope. It is 
only in a dream that he sees Corruption, "Lady Meed," brought to 
trial, and the world repenting at the preaching of Reason. In the 
waking life Reason finds no listeners. The poet himself is looked 
upon — he tells us bitterly— as a madman. There is a terrible despair 
in the close of his later poem, where the triumph of Christ is only 
followed by the reign of Antichrist ; where Contrition slumbers 
amidst the revel of Death and Sin ; and Conscience, hard beset by 
Pride and Sloth, rouses himself with a last effort, and seizing his 
pilgrim staff wanders over the world to find Piers Ploughman. 

The strife indeed which Longland would have averted raged only 
the fiercer after the repression of the Peasant Revolt. The Statutes 
of Labourers, effective as they proved in sowing hatred between 
rich and poor, and in creating a mass of pauperism for later times to 
deal with, were powerless for their immediate ends, either in reducing 
the actual rate of wages or in restricting the mass of floating labour to 
definite areas of employment. During the century and a half after 
the Peasant Revolt villainage died out so rapidly that it became a rare 
and antiquated thing. A hundred years after the Black Death, we 
learn from a high authority that the wages of an English labourer 
" commanded twice the amount of the necessaries of life which could 
have been obtained for the wages paid under Edward the Third." The 
statement is corroborated by the incidental descriptions of the life of 
the working classes which we find in Piers Ploughman. Labourers, 
Longland tells us, "that have no land to live on but their hands," 
disdained to live on penny ale or bacon, but demanded " fresh flesh 
or fish, fried or bake, and that hot or hotter for chilling of their maw." 
The market was still in fact in the labourer's hands, in spite of statutes \ 
"and but if he be highly hired else will he chide and wail the time that he 
was made a workman." The poet saw clearly that as population rose 
to its normal rate times such as these would pass away. "Whiles 
Hunger was their master here would none of them chide nor strive 
against his statute, so sternly he looked : and I warn you, workmen, 
win while ye may, for Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast." But even 
at the time when he wrote there were seasons of the year during which 
-employment for this floating mass of labour was hard to find. In the 
long interval between harvest-tide and harvest-tide, work and food 
were alike scarce in the mediaeval homestead. "I have no penny," 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



says Piers the Ploughman in such a season, in lines which give us the 
picture of a farm of the day, " pullets for to buy, nor neither geese 
nor pigs, but two green cheeses, a few curds and cream, and an oaten 
cake, and two loaves of beans and bran baken for my children. I 
have no salt bacon nor no cooked meat collops for to make, but I have 
parsley and leeks and many cabbage plants, and eke a cow and a 
calf, and a cart-mare to draw a-field my dung while the drought 
lasteth, and by this livelihood we must all live till Lammas -tide 
(August), and by that I hope to have harvest in my croft." But 
it was not till Lammas-tide that high wages and the new corn 
bade " Hunger go to sleep," and during the long spring and sum^mer 
the free labourer, and the "waster that will not work but wander 
about, that will eat no bread but the finest wheat, nor drink but 
of the best and brownest ale," was a source of social and political 
danger. " He grieveth him against God and grudgeth against 
Reason, and then curseth he the King and all his Council after such 
law to allow labourers to grieve." The terror of the landowners 
expressed itself in legislation which was a fitting sequel of the Statutes 
of Labourers. They forbade the child of any tiller of the soil to be 
apprenticed in a town. They prayed Richard to ordain "that no 
bondman nor bondwoman shall place their children at school, as has 
been done, so as to advance their children in the world by their going 
into the Church." The new colleges which were being founded at the 
two Universities at this moment closed their gates upon villains. It 
was the failure of such futile efforts to effect their aim which drove 
the energy of the great proprietors into a new direction, and in the 
end revolutionized the whole agricultural system of the country. 
Sheep farming required fewer hands than tillage, and the scarcity 
and high price of labour tended to throw more and more land into 
sheep-farms. In the decrease of personal service, as villainage died 
away, it became the interest of the lord to diminish the number of 
tenants on his estate as it had been before his interest to maintain it, 
and he did this by massing the small allotments together into larger 
holdings. By this course of eviction the number of the free-labour 
class was enormously increased while the area of employment was 
diminished ; and the social danger from vagabondage and the " sturdy 
beggar " grew every day greater till it brought about the despotism of 
the Tudors. 

This social danger mingled with the yet more formidable religious 
peril which sprang from the party violence of the later Lollardry. The 
persecution of Courtenay had deprived the religious reform of its 
more learned adherents and of the support of the University, while 
Wychf s death had robbed it of its head at a moment when little had 
been done save a work of destruction. From that moment Lollardism 
ceased to be in any sense an organized movement, and crumbled into 



252 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



a general spirit of revolt. All the religious and social discontent of 
the times floated instinctively to this new centre ; the socialist dreams 
of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the 
hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, 
the fanaticism of the Puritan zealot were blended together in a common 
hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute personal 
religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system. But it was ]this want 
of organization, this looseness and fluidity of the new movement, that 
made it penetrate through every class of society. Women as well as 
men became the preachers of the new sect. Its numbers increased till 
to the frenzied panic of the Churchmen it seemed as if every third man 
in the streets was a Lollard. The movement had its own schools, its 
own books ; its pamphlets were passed everywhere from hand to hand ; 
scurrilous ballads, in which it revived old attacks of " Golias " in the 
Angevin times upon the wealth and luxury of the clergy were sung at 
every corner. Nobles, like the Earl of Sahsbury, and at a later time 
Sir John Oldcastle, placed themselves openly at the head of the cause 
and threw open their gates as a refuge for its missionaries. London 
in its hatred of the clergy was fiercely Lollard, and defended a Lollard 
preacher who had ventured to advocate the new doctrines from the 
pulpit of St. PauFs. Its mayor, John of Northampton, showed the 
influence of the new morality in the Puritan spirit with which he dealt 
with the morals of the city. Compelled to act, as he said, by the remiss- 
ness of the clergy, who connived for money at every kind of debauchery, 
he arrested the loose women, cut off their hair, and carted them 
through the streets as an object of public scorn. But the moral spirit 
of the new movement, though infinitely its grander side, was less dan- 
gerous to the Church than its open repudiation of the older doctrines 
and systems of Christendom. Out of the floating mass of opinion 
which bore the name of Lollardry one great faith gradually evolved 
itself, a faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a source of religious 
truth. The translation of Wyclif did its work. Scripture, complains 
a canon of Leicester, "became a vulgar thing, and more open to lay 
folk and women that knew how to read than it is wont to be to clerks 
themselves." Consequences which Wyclif had perhaps shrunk from 
drawing were boldly drawn by his disciples. The Church was 
declared to have become apostate, its priesthood was denounced as no 
priesthood, its sacraments as idolatry. It was in vain that the clergy 
attempted to stifle the new movement by their old weapon of perse- 
cution. The jealousy entertained by the baronage and gentry of every 
pretension of the Church to secular power foiled its efforts to make 
persecution effective. At the moment of the Peasant Revolt, Courtenay 
procured the enactment of a statute which commissioned the sheriffs to 
seize all persons convicted before the bishops of preaching heresy. 
But the statute was repealed in the next session, and the Commons 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



253 



added to the bitterness of the blow by their protest that they considered 
it ^' in nowise their interest to be more under the jurisdiction of the 
prelates or more bound by them than their ancestors had been in 
times past." Heresy indeed was still a felony by the common law, and 
there were earlier instances in our history of the punishment of heretics 
by the fire. But the limitation of each bishop's jurisdiction within the 
limits of his own diocese made it almost impossible to arrest the wander- 
ing preachers of the new doctrine, and the civil punishment — even if it 
had been sanctioned by public opinion — seems to have long fallen into 
desuetude. Experience proved to the prelates that no sheriff would 
arrest on the mere warrant of an ecclesiastical officer, and that no 
royal court would issue the old writ " for the burning of a heretic " 
on a bishop's requisition. But powerless as the efforts of the Church 
were for purposes of repression, they were effective in rousing the 
temper of the Lollards into a bitter and fanatical hatred of their 
persecutors. The Lollard teachers directed their fiercest invectives 
against the wealth and secularity of the great Churchmen. In a 
formal petition to Parliament they mingled denunciations of the 
riches of the clergy with an open profession of disbelief in tran- 
substantiation, priesthood, pilgrimages, and image worship, and a 
demand, which illustrates the strange medley of opinions which 
jostled together in the new movement, that war might be declared 
unchristian, and that trades such as those of the goldsmith or the 
armourer, which were contrary to apostolical poverty, might be ban- 
ished from the realm. They contended (and it is remarkable that a 
Parliament of the next reign adopted the statement) that from the 
superfluous revenues of the Church, if once they were applied to 
purposes of general utility, the King might maintain fifteen earls, 
fifteen hundred knights, and six thousand squires, besides endowing 
a hundred hospitals for the relief of the poor. 

The distress of the landowners, the general disorganization of the 
country, in every part of which bands of marauders were openly 
defying the law, the panic of the Church and of society at large as the 
projects of the Lollards shaped themselves into more daring and 
revolutionary forms, added a fresh keenness to the national discontent 
at the languid and inefficient prosecution of the war. France was, in 
fact,' mistress of the seas ; Guienne lay at her mercy, and the northern 
frontier of England itself was flung open to her by the alliance of the 
Scots. The landing of a French force in the Forth roused the whole 
country to a desperate effort, and a large and well-equipped army of 
Englishmen penetrated as far as Edinburgh in the vain hope of bring- 
ing their enemy to battle. A more terrible blow followed in the sub- 
mission of Ghent to the French forces, the reception of a French prince 
by Flanders as its Count, and the loss of the one remaining market for 
English commerce ; while the forces which should have been employed 



Sec. V. 
Richard 

THE 

Second. 
1381- 
1399. 



1395- 



The 
Frendi 
Wars. 



1385. 



254 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



in saving it, and in the protection' of the Enghsh shores against 
the threat of invasion, were squandered by John of Gaunt on the 
Spanish frontier in pursuit of a visionary crown, which he claimed 
in his wife's right, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel. But even 
calamities such as these galled the national pride less than the peace 
tendency of the court. Michael de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, 
had stood since the suppression of the revolt at the head of the 
royal councils, and the whole aim of his policy had been to bring 
about a reconciliation with France. Unsuccessful as they were in 
effecting this object, his efforts roused the resentment of the nobles, 
and at the instigation of the Duke of Gloucester, who, in the 
absence of his brother, John of Gaunt, had placed himself at its 
head, the Parliament demanded the dismissal of the minister and 
the transfer of the royal power to a permanent Council chosen 
by the lords. The resistance of the young King was crushed by 
the appearance of the baronage in arms, and a bill of impeach- 
ment hurried into exile and to death both the Earl and the judges 
of his party who had pronounced the rule of the Council to be 
in itself illegal. It may have been the violence of these measures 
which restored popular sympathy to the royal cause, for hardly a year 
had passed when Richard found himself strong enough to break down 
by a word the government against which he had struggled so vainly. 
In the great Easter Council he suddenly asked his uncle to tell him 
how old he was. " Your Highness," replied Gloucester, " is in your 
twenty-second year." "Then I am old enough to manage my own 
affairs," said Richard, coolly. " I have been longer under guardian- 
ship than any ward in my realm. I thank you for your past services, 
my lords, but I need them no longer." 

For nine years the young King wielded the power which thus passed 
quietly into his hands with singular wisdom and good fortune. On the 
one hand he carried his peace policy into effect by a succession of ^ 
negotiations which brought about the conclusion of a truce for four 
years, and this period of rest was lengthened to twenty-eight by a 
subsequent agreement on his marriage with Isabella, the daughter 
! of Charles the Fifth of France. On the other he announced his 
resolve to rule by the advice of his Parliament, submitted t© its 
censure, and consulted it on all matters of importance. In a vigorous 
campaign he pacified Ireland while redressing the abuses of its 
government ; and the Lollard troubles which had broken out during 
his absence were at once repressed on his return. But the brilliant 
abilities which Richard shared with the rest of the Plantagenets 
were marred by a fitful inconstancy and a mean spirit of revenge. 
His uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, remained at the head of the 
war-party ; his turbulent opposition to the peace policy of the 
King, and his resistance to the French marriage which embodied it, 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' IVAR, 



255 



may have made a conflict inevitable ; but the readiness with which 
Richard seized on the opportunity of provoking such a contest 
shows the bitterness with which during the long years which 
had passed since the death of Suffolk he had brooded over his 
projects of vengeance. The Parliament which had been employed by 
Gloucester to humble the Crown was now used to crush its opponents. 
The pardons granted nine years before were recalled ; the commission 
of Regency declared to have been illegal, and it v/as ruled that the 
enactment of such a measure rendered its promoters guilty of 
treason. The blow was ruthlessly followed up. When the summons 
to answer to his impeachment reached the Duke, he was found 
dead in his prison at Calais : while his chief supporter, Arundel, 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned to exile, and the 
nobles of his party to imprisonment. The measures introduced 
into the Parliament of the following year showed that from a mere 
project of revenge Richard's designs had widened into a definite plan 
of absolute government. He was freed from Parliamentary control by 
the grant to him of a tax upon wool for the term of his life. His next 
step got rid of Parliament itself. A committee of twelve peers and 
six commoners was appointed in Parliament, with power to continue 
their sittings after its dissolution and to "examine and determine all 
matters and subjects which had been moved in the presence of the 
king with all the dependencies thereof." The aim of Richard was to 
supersede by means of this permanent commission the body from 
which it originated : he at once employed it to determine causes and 
enact laws, and forced from every tenant of the Crotvn an oath to 
recognize the validity of its acts and to oppose any attempts to alter 
or revoke them. With such an engine at his command the Kino- was 
absolute, and with the appearance of absolutism the temper of his rei^-n 
suddenly changed. A system of forced loans, the sale of charters of 
pardon to Gloucester's adherents, the outlawry of seventeen counties 
at once on the plea that they had supported his enemies, a reckless 
interference with the course of justice and -the independence of the 
judges, roused into new life the social and political discontent which 
was threatening the very existence of the Crown. 

By his good government and by his evil government alike Richard 
had succeeded in alienating every class of his subjects. He had 
estranged the nobles by his peace policy, the landowners by his refusal 
to sanction the insane measures of repression they directed ao-ainst 
the labourer, the merchant class by his illegal exactions, and the 
Church by his shelter of the Lollards. Not only had the persecu- 
tion of the new sect been foiled by the inactivity of the royal 
officers and the repeal of the bills of heresy introduced by the 
Primate, but Lollardism found favour in the very precincts of the 
court. It was through the patronage of Richard's first queen, Anne 



256 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of Bohemia, that the tracts and Bible of the Reformer had been 
introduced into her native land to give rise to the remarkable move- 
ment which found its earliest leaders in John Huss and Jerome 
of Prague. The head of the sect, the Earl of Salisbury, was of ail 
the English nobles the most favoured by and the most faithful to the 
King. Richard stood almost alone in fact in his realm, but even this 
accumulated mass of hatred might have failed to crush him had not an 
act of jealousy and tyranny placed an able and unscrupulous leader at 
the head of the national discontent. Henry, Earl of Derby and Duk€ 
of Hereford, the eldest son of John of Gaunt, though he had taken 
part against his royal cousin in the earlier troubles of his reign, had 
loyally supported him in his recent measures against Gloucester. No 
sooner, however, were these measures successful than Richard turned his 
new power against the more dangerous House of Lancaster, and availing 
himself of a quarrel between the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk, in 
which each party bandied accusations of treason against the other, 
banished both from the realm. Banishment was soon followed by 
outlawry, and on his father's death Henry found himself deprived both 
of the title and estates of his house. At the moment when he had thus 
driven his cousin to despair, Richard crossed into Ireland to com- 
plete the work of conquest and organization which he had begun 
there ; and Archbishop Arundel, an exile like himself, urged the Ear) 
to take advantage of the King's absence for the recover}^ of his rights. 
Eluding the vigilance of the French Court, at which he had taken 
shelter, Henry landed with a handful of men on the coast of York- 
shire, where he was at once joined by the Earls of Northumberland 
and Westmoreland, the heads of the great houses of the Percies 
and the Nevilles ; and, with an army which grew as he advanced, 
entered triumphantly into London. The Duke of York, whom the 
King had left regent, united his forces to those of Henry, and 
when Richard landed at Milford Haven he found the kingdom lost. 
His own army dispersed as it landed, and the deserted King fled 
in disguise to North Wales to find a second force which the Earl 
of Salisbury had gathered for his support already disbanded. In- 
vited to a conference with the Duke of Lancaster at Flint, he saw 
himself surrounded by the rebel forces. " I am betrayed," he cried, 
as the view of his enemies burst on him from the hill ; " there are 
pennons and banners in the valley." But it was too late for retreat. 
Richard was seized and brought before his cousin. " I am come 
before my time," said Lancaster, "but I will show you the reason. 
Your people, my lord, complain that for the space of twenty years you 
have ruled them harshly : however, if it please God, I will help you to 
rule them better." " Fair cousin," replied the King, *^ since it pleases 
you, it pleases me well." But Henry's designs went far beyond a share 
in the government of the realm. The Parliament which assembled in 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



257 



Westminster Hall received with shouts of applause a formal paper in 
which Richard resigned the Crown as one incapable of reigning and 
worthy for his great demerits to be deposed. The resignation was, in 
fact, confirmed by a solemn Act of Deposition. The coronation oath 
was read, and a long impeachment, which stated the breach of the 
promises made in it, was followed by a solemn vote of both Houses 
which removed Richard from the state and authority of King. Ac- 
cording to the strict rules of hereditary descent as construed by the 
feudal lawyers, by an assumed analogy with the descent of ordinary 
estates, the crown would now have passed to a house which had at an j 
earlier period played a leading part in the revolutions of the Edwards, j 
The great-grandson of the Mortimer who brought about the deposition | 
of Edward the Second had married the daughter and heiress of Lionel i 
of Clarence, the third son of Edward the Third. The childlessness of i 
Richard and the death of Edward's second son without issue placed ! 
Edmund, his grandson by this marriage, first among the claimants of the | 
crown ; but he was a child of six years old, the strict rule of hereditary j 
descent had never received any formal recognition in the case of the | 
Crown, and precedent had established the right of Parliament to choose \ 
in such a case a successor among any other members of the Royal House. | 
With the characteristic subtlety of his temper, however, Henry pro- j 
fessed to disguise this choice of the nation by the assertion of a ^ 
second right arising from a supposed conquest of the realm. He 
rose from his seat and solemnly challenged the crown, "as thatj 
I am descended by regal line of blood coming from the good lord i 
King Henry the Third, and through that right that God of His j 
Grace hath sent me with help of my kin and of my friends to recover 
it : the which realm was in point to be undone for default of govern- 
ance and undoing of good laws." Whatever defects such a claim 
might present were more than covered by the solemn recognition of 
Parliament. The two Archbishops, taking the new sovereign by the 
hand, seated him upon the throne, and Henry in emphatic words 
ratified the compact between himself and his people. " Sirs," he said 
to the prelates, lords, knights, and burgesses gathered round him, ' 
'* I thank God and you, spiritual and temporal, and all estates of the 
^and : and do you to wit it is not my will that any man think that 
vj way of conquest I would disinherit any of his heritage, franchises, 
:>r other rights that he ought to have, nor put him out of the good I 
that he has and has had by the good laws and customs of the realm, 1 
except those persons that have been against the good purpose and ^ 
the common profit of the realm." 1 



Sec. V. 

RlCHA«D 
THE 

Second. 

13S1- 
1399. 



258 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

House of 

Lancaster. 

1399- 

1422. 



The 
Suppres- 
sion 
of laOl- 
lardryi 



Section Vis— The House of Lancaster, 1399—1422. 

{Autho7ifies. — For Henry the Fourth the ** Annales Henrici Quarti" and 
Walsingham, as before. For his successor, the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by 
Titus Livius, a chaplain in the Royal army (published by English Historical 
Society) ; the life by Elmham, Prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical 
in arrangement and facts with the former work ; the biography by Robert 
Redman, and the metrical Chronicle by Elmham, published by the Master of 
the Rolls under the title of '* Memorials of Henry the Fifth"; with the 
meagre Chronicles of Hard}ng and Otterbourne. Monstrelet is the most 
important French authority for this period ; the Norman campaigns may be 
studied in M. Puiseux' "Siege de Rouen," Caen, 1867. Lord Brougham 
has given a vigorous and, in a constitutional point of view, valuable sketch of 
this period in his '* History of England under the House of Lancaster."] 



Raised to the throne by a Parliamentary revolution and resting its 
claims on a Parliamentary title, the House of Lancaster was precluded 
by its very position from any resumption of the last struggle for inde- 
pendence on the part of the Crown which had culminated in the bold 
effort of Richard the Second. During no period of our early history 
were the powers of the two Houses so frankly recognized. The tone 
of Henry the Fourth till the very close of his reign is that of humble 
compliance with the prayers of the Parliament, and even his imperious 
successor shrank almost with timidity from any conflict with it. But 
the Crown had been bought by other pledges less noble than that of 
constitutional rule. The support of the nobles had been secured by a 
tacit engagement on Henry's part to reverse the peace policy of his pre- 
decessor and to renew the fatal war with France. The support of the 
Church had been purchased by the more terrible promise of persecution. 
The last pledge was speedily redeemed. In the first Convocation of 
his reign Henry announced himself as the protector of the Church, 
and ordered the prelates to take measures for the suppression of heresy 
and of the wandering preachers. The hindrances which had neutrahzed 
the efforts of the bishops were taken away by an Act which gave them 
power to arrest on common rumour, to put the accused to purgation, 
and to punish with imprisonment. These, however, were but preludes 
to the more formidable provisions of the Statute of Heretics. By 
the provisions of this infamous Act, bishops were now not only 
permitted to arrest and imprison, so long as their heresy should 
last, all preachers of heresy, all schoolmasters infected with heretical 
teaching, all owners or writers of heretical books, but a refusal 
to abjure, or a relapse after abjuration, enabled them to hand over 
the heretic to the civil officers, and by these — so ran the first legal 
enactment of religious bloodshed which defiled our statute book — he 
was to be burnt on a high place before the people. The statute] 
was hardly passed before William Sawtre, who had quitted aj 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



259 



.,.-. rectory to spread the new Lollardism, became its first 

vict' • A layman, John Badbie, was committed to the flames in 
the p(r;.^cnce of the Prince of Wales for a denial of transubstantiation. 
The groans of the sufferer were taken for a recantation, and the 
Prince ordered the fire to be pkicked away ; but the offer of life and of 
a pension failed to break the spirit of the Lollard, and he was again 
hurled back to his doom. It was probably the fierce resentment of 
the Reformers which gave life to the incessant revolts which threatened 
the throtie of Henry the Fourth. The mere maintenance of his power 
through the troubled years of his reign is the best proof of the King's 
abihty. A conspiracy of Richard's half-brothers, the Earls of Hun- 
tingdon and Kent, was hardly suppressed when the discontent of the 
Percies at the ingratitude of a monarch whom they claimed to have 
raised to the crown broke out in rebellion, and Hotspur, the son of the 
P^arl of Northumberland, leagued himself with the Scots and with the 
insurgents of Wales. His defeat and death in an obstinate battle 
near Shrewsbury for a time averted the danger ; but three years later 
his father rose in a fresh insurrection, and though the seizure and 
execution of his fellow-conspirator Scrope, the Archbishop of York, 
drove Northumberland over the border, he remained till his death in a 
later inroad a peril to the throne. Encouraged meanwhile by the 
■veakness of England, Wales, so long tranquil, shook off the yoke of 
her conquerors, and the whole country rose at the call of an adven- 
turer, Owen Glendower, or of Glendowerdy, who proclaimed himself 
the descendant of its native princes. Owen left the invaders, as of 
old, to contend with famine and the mountain storms ; but they 
had no sooner retired than he sallied out from his inaccessible fast- 
nesses to win victories which were followed by the adhesion of all 
North Wales and great part of the South to his cause, while a force of 
French auxiliaries was despatched by Charles of France to his aid. I 
It was only the restoration of peace in England which enabled Henry ^ 
to roll back the tide of Glendower's success. By slow and deliberate 
'-ampaigns continued through four years the Prince of Wales wrested 
from him the South ; his subjects in the North, discouraged by succes- 
sive defeats, gradually fell away from his standard ; and the repulse of 
* " ^1:- descent upon Shropshire drove Owen at last to take refuge 
he mountains of Snowdon, where he seems to have main- 
i A.r.ca Lie contest, single-handed, till his death. With the close of the 
Welsh rising the Lancastrian throne felt itself secure from without, but 
' f.^;er from the Lollards remained as great as ever within. The 
ute and its terrible penalties were boldly defied. The death of 
II ■.: z..^xi of Salisbury in one of the revolts against Henry, though his 
gory herid was welcomed into London by a procession of abbots and 
bishops who went out singing psalms of thanksgiving to meet it, only 
transferred the leadership of the party to one of the foremost warriors of 

S 2 



The 

House or 

Lancaster. 

1339- 

1422. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the time. Sir John Oldcastle, whose marriage raised him to the title 
of Lord Cobham, threw open his castle of Cawley to the Lollards as 
their head-quarters, sheltered their preachers, and set the prohibitions 
and sentences of the bishops at defiance. Although Henry the Fourth 
died worn out with the troubles of his reign without venturing to cope 
with this formidable opponent, the stern temper of his successor at 
once faced the danger. A new royal mandate was issued against the 
preachers, and Oldcastle was besieged in his castle and conducted as 
a prisoner to the Tower. His escape was the signal for the revolt of 
his sect. A secret command summoned the Lollards to assemble in 
St. George's fields. We gather, if not the real aims of the rising, at 
least the terror that it caused, from Henry's statement that its purpose 
was " to destroy himself, his brothers, and several of the spiritual and 
temporal lords ; " but the vigilance of the young King prevented the 
junction of the Lollards of London with their friends in the country 
by securing the city gates, and those who appeared at the place of 
meeting were dispersed by the royal forces. On the failure of the 
rising, the law was rendered more rigorous. Magistrates were 
directed to arrest all Lollards and hand them over to the bishops ; a 
conviction of heresy was made to entail forfeiture of blood and of 
estate ; and the execution of thirty-nine prominent Lollards was 
followed after some years by the arrest of Oldcastle himself. In 
spite of his rank and of an old friendship with the King, Lord Cobham 
was hung alive in chains and a fire slowly kindled beneath his feet 

With the death of Sir John Oldcastle the political activity of 
Lollardism came suddenly to an end, while the steady persecution of 
the bishops, if it failed to extinguish it as a religious movement, 
succeeded in destroying the vigour and energy which it had shown at 
the outset of its career. But the House of Lancaster had, as yet, 
only partially accomplished the aims with which it mounted the 
throne. In the eyes of the nobles, Richard's chief crime had been 
his policy of peace, and the aid which they gave to the revolution 
sprang mainly from their hope of a renev/al of the war. The energ> 
of the war-party was seconded by the temper of the nation at larg( 
already forgetful of the sufferings of the past struggle and longint 
only to wipe out its shame. The internal calamities of France 
offered at this moment a tempting opportunity for aggression. Its 
King, Charles the Sixth, was a maniac, while its princes and nobles 
were divided into two great parties, the one headed by the Duke 
of Burgundy and bearing his name, the other by the Duke of Orleans 
and bearing the title of Armagnacs. The struggle had been jealously 
watched by Henry the Fourth, but his attempt to feed it by pushing 
an English force into France at once united the combatants. Their 
strife, however, recommenced more bitterly than ever when the claim 
of the French crown by Henry the Fifth on his accession declared his 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 



261 



purpose of renewing the war. No claim could have been more utterly 
baseless, for the Parliamentary title by which the House of Lancaster 
held England could give it no right over France, and the strict law 
of hereditary succession which Edward asserted could be pleaded, if 
pleaded at all, only by the House of Mortimer. Not only the claim, 
indeed, but the ver\' nature of the war itself was wholly different from 
that of Edward the Third. Edward had been forced into the struggle | 
against his will by the ceaseless attacks of France, and his claim of 
the crown was a mere afterthought to secure the alliance of Flanders. 
The war of Henry, on the other hand, though in form a mere renewal 
of the earlier struggle on the expiration of the truce made by Richard, 
%as in fact a wanton aggression on the part of a nation tempted by 
the helplessness of its opponent and still galled by the memory of 
former defeat. It was in vain that the French strove to avert the 
'^nglish attack by an offer to surrender the Duchy of Acquitaine ; 
Henry's aims pointed to the acquisition of Normandy rather than of 
the South, and his first exploit was the capture of Harfleur. Dysen- 
tery made havoc in his ranks during the siege, and it was with a mere 
handful of men that he resolved to insult the enemy by a daring 
march, like that of Edward, upon Calais. The discord, however, 
on which he probably reckoned for security, vanished before the 
actual appearance of the invaders in the heart of France, and when 
his weary and half-starved force succeeded in crossing the Somme, 
it found sixty thousand Frenchmen encamped right aross its line of 
march. Their position, flanked on either side by woods, but with a 
front so narrow that the dense masses were drawn up thirty men deep, 
was strong for purposes of defence but ill suited for attack ; and the 
French leaders, warned by the experience of Cressy and Poitiers, 
resolved to await the English advance. Henry, on the other hand, 
had no choice between attack and unconditional surrender. His 
troops were starving, and the way to Calais lay across the French 
army. But the King's courage rose with the peril A knight — it ; 
was said — in his train wished that the thousands of stout wamors | 
lying idle that night in England had been standing in his ranks, i 
H^hry answered with a burst of scorn. " I would not have a single i 
man more," he replied. " If God give us the victory, it will be plain I 
that we owe it to His grace. If not, the fewer we are, the less loss I 
for England." Starving and sick as were the handful of men whom ' 
he led, they shared the spirit of their leader. As the chill rainy night | 
passed away, his archers bared their arms and breasts to give fair play | 
to " the crooked stick and the grey goose wing," but for which — as the •, 
rhyme ran — " England were but a fling," and with a great shout sprang | 
forward to the attack. The sight of their advance roused the fiery i 
pride of the French ; the wise resolve of their leaders was forgotten j 
and the dense mass of men-at-arms plunged heavily forward through I 



Sec. VI. 

The 

House of 

Lajtcastrr, 

1399- 

14.221. 



0'.toher as. 



262 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Skc VI. 
The 

liOUSK OF 
l.ANCASTER. 

1399- 
1422. 



The 
Conquest 
of Nor- 
mandy » 



miry ground on the English front. But at the first sign of move- 
ment Henry had halted his line, and fixing in the ground the sharp 
palisades with which each man was furnished, his archers poured their 
fatal arrow flights into the hostile ranks. The carnage was terrible, 
but the desperate charges of the French knighthood at last drove the 
English archers to the neighbouring woods, from which they were 
still able to pour their shot into the enemy's flanks, while Henry, with 
the men-at-arms around him, flung himself on the French line. In 
the terrible struggle which followed the King bore off the palm of 
bravery : he was felled once by a blow from a French mace, and the 
crown on his helmet was cleft by the sword of the Duke of Alengon ; 
but the enemy was at last broken, and the defeat of the main body 
of the French was followed at once by the rout of their reserve. The 
triumph was more complete, as the odds were even greater, than at 
Cressy. Eleven thousand Frenchmen lay dead on the field, and more 
than a hundred princes and great lords were among the fallen. 

The immediate result of the battle of Agincourt was small, for the 
English army was too exhausted for pursuit, and it made its way to 
Calais only to return to England. The war was limited to a contest, 
for the command of the Channel, till the increasing bitterness of the 
strife between the Burgundians and Armagnacs encouraged Henry to 
resume his attempt to recover Normandy. Whatever may have been 
his aim in this enterprise — whether it were, as has been suggested, to 
provide a refuge for his House, should its power be broken in England, 
or simply to acquire a command of the seas — the patience and skill 
with which his object was accomplished raise him high in the rank 
of military leaders. Disembarking with an army of 40,000 men, near 
the mouth of the Touque, he stormed Caen, received the surrender of 
Bayeux, reduced Alengon and Falaise, and detaching his brother the 
Duke of Gloucester to occupy the Cotentin, made himself master of 
Avranches and Domfront. With Lower Normandy wholly in his 
hands, he advanced upon Evreux, captured Louviers, and, seizing Pont 
de TArche, threw his troops across the Seine. The end of these 
masterly movements was now revealed. Rouen was at this time the 
largest and wealthiest of the towns of France ; its walls were 
defended by a powerful artillery ; Alan Blanchard, a brave and 
resolute patriot, infused the fire of his own temper into the vast 
population ; and the garrison, already strong, was backed by fifteen 
thousand citizens in arms. But the genius of Henry was more than 
equal to the difficulties with which he had to deal. He had secured 
himself from an attack on his rear by the reduction of Lower Nor- 
mandy, his earlier occupation of Harfleur severed the town from the 
sea, and his conquest of Pont de TArche cut it off from relief on 
the side of Paris. Slowly but steadily the King drew his lines of 
investment round the doomed city ; a flotilla was brought up from 



v.] 



THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR, 



263 



Harileur, a bridge of boats thrown over the Seine above the town, 
the deep trenches of the besiegers protected by posts, and the des- 
perate salhes of the garrison stubbornly beaten back. For six months 
Rouen held resolutely out, but famine told fast on the vast throng 
of country folk who had taken refuge within its walls. Twelve 
thousand of these were at last thrust out of the city gates, but the cold 
policy of the conqueror refused them passage, and they perished 
between the trenches and the walls. In the hour of their agony 
women gave birth to infants, but even the new-born babes which 
were drawn up in baskets to receive baptism were lowered again 
to die on their mother's breast. It was little better within the town 
itself. As winter drew on one-half of the population wasted away. 
" War," said the terrible King, " has three handmaidens ever waiting 
on her. Fire, Blood, and Famine, and I have chosen the meekest maid 
of the three.'' But his demand of unconditional surrender nerved the 
citizens to a resolve of despair ; they determined to fire the city and 
fling themselves in a mass on the English lines ; and Henry, fearful 
lest his prize should escape him at the last, was driven to offer terms. 
Those who rejected a foreign yoke were suffered to leave the city, but 
his vengeance reserved its victim in Alan Blanchard, and the brave 
patriot was at Henry's orders put to death in cold blood. 

A few sieges completed the reduction of Normandy. The King's 
designs were still limited to the acquisition of that province ; and 
pausing in his career of conquest, he strove to win its loyalty by a 
remission of taxation and a redress of grievances, and to seal its 
possession by a formal peace with the French Crown. The confer- 
ences, however, which were held for this purpose at Pontoise failed 
though the temporary reconciliation of the French factions, while 
the length and expense of the war began to rouse remonstrance and 
discontent at home. The King's difficulties were at their height 
when the assassination of the Duke of Burgundy at Montereau, in 
the very presence of the Dauphin with whom he had come to hold 
conference, rekindled the fires of civil strife. The whole Burgundian 
party, with the new Duke, Philip the Good, at its head, flung itself in 
a wild thirst for revenge into Henry's hands. The mad King, Charles 
the Sixth, with his Queen and daughters, were in Philip's hands, and 
in his resolve to exclude the Dauphin from the throne the Duke 
stooped to buy English aid by giving Catherine, the eldest of the 
French princesses, in marriage to Henry, by conferring on him the 
Regency during the life of Charles, and recognizing his succession to 
the crown at that sovereign's death. The treaty was solemnly ratified 
by Charles himself in a conference at Troyes, and Henry, who in his 
new capacity of Regent had undertaken to conquer in the name of 
his father-in-law the territory held by the Dauphin, reduced the towns ,' 
of the Upper Seine and entered Paris in triumph side by side with 



264 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



Sbc. VI. 

The 
House of 
Lancaster. 

1369- 
1422. 



Au^. 1422. 



the King. The States-General of the realm were solemnly convened 
to the capital ; and strange as the provisions of the Treaty of Troyes 
must have seemed, they were confirmed without a murmur, and 
Henry recognized as the future sovereign of France. A passing 
defeat of his brother Garence in Anjou roused him from these solem- 
nities. His re-appearance in the field was marked by the capture 
of Dreux, and a repulse before Orleans was redeemed by his success 
in the long and obstinate siege of Meaux. At no time had the fortunes 
of Henry reached a higher pitch than at the moment when he felt the 
touch of death. But the rapidity of his disease baffled the skill of 
physicians, and with a strangely characteristic regret that he had not 
lived to achieve the conquest of Jerusalem, the great Conqueror 
passed away. 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



265 



CHAPTER VL 

THE NEW MONARCHY. 
14.22—154.0- 

Section I.— Joan of Arc. 14.22-1451. 

{Authorities. — The " Wars of the English in France," and Blondel's work 
**De Reductione Normanniae," both published by the Master of the Rolls, 
give ample information on the military side of this period. Monstrelet 
remains our chief source of knowledge on the French side. The " Proces de 
Jeanne d'Arc," published by the Societe de I'histoire de France, is the only 
real authority for her history. For English affairs we are reduced to the 
meagre accounts of William of Worcester, of the Continuator of the Croyland 
Chronicle, and of Fabyan. Fabyan, a London alderman with a strong bias in 
favour of the House of Lancaster, is useful for London only. The Continu- 
ator is one of the best of his class, and though connected with the House of 
York, the date of his work, which appeared soon after Bosworth Field, makes 
him fairly impartial, but he is sketchy and deficient in actual facts. The more 
copious narrative of Polydore Vergil is far superior to these in literary ability, 
but of later date and strongly Lancastrian in tone. The Rolls of Parliament 
and Rymer are of high value during this period. Among modem writers M. 
Michelet, in his ** History of France" (vol. v.), has given a portrait of the 
Maid of Orleans at once exact and full of a tender poetry. Lord Brougham 
(** England under the House of Lancaster") is still useful on constitutional 
points. 

The glory of Agincourt and the genius of Henry the Fifth hardly 
veiled at the close of his reign the weakness and humiliation of the 
Crown, hampered as it was by foreign war, by a huge debt amounting 
to nearly four millions of our money and which increased each year 
as the expenses doubled the income, by the weakness of its own title 
and by the claims of the House of Mortimer. The long minority of 
Heniy the Sixth, who was a boy of nine years old at his father's death, 
as well as the personal weakness which marked his after-rule, left 
the House of Lancaster at the mercy of the Parliament. But 
the Parliament was fast dying down into a mere representation of 
the baronage and the great landowners. The Commons indeed 
retained the right of granting and controlling subsidies, of joining 
in all statutory enactments, and of impeaching ministers. But the 
Lower House was ceasing to be a real representative of the "Com- 
mons" whose name it bore. The borough franchise was suffering 
from the general tendency to restriction and privilege which in the 
bulk of towns was soon to reduce it to a farce. Up to this time all 



266 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



freemen settling in a borougli and paying their dues to it became 
by the mere settlement its burgesses ; but during the reign of Henry 
the Sixth this largeness of borough life was roughly curtailed. The 
trade companies which vindicated civic freedom from the tyranny of 
the older merchant guilds themselves tended to become a narrow 
and exclusive oligarchy. Most of the boroughs had by this time 
acquired civic property, and it was with the aim of securing their 
own enjoyment of this against any share of it by " strangers " that 
the existing burgesses, for the most part, procured charters of incor- 
poration from the Crown, which turned them into a close body and 
excluded from their number all who were not burgesses by birth or 
who failed henceforth to purchase their right of entrance by a long 
apprenticeship. In addition to this narrowing of the burgess-body, 
the internal government of the boroughs had almost universally 
passed, since the failure of the Communal movement in the thirteenth 
century, from the free gathering of the citizens in borough-mote into 
the hands of Common Councils, either self-elected or elected by the 
wealthier burgesses ; and it was to these councils, or to a yet more 
restricted number of " select men " belonging to them, that clauses in 
the new charters generally confined the right of choosing their repre- 
sentatives in Parliament. The restriction of the county franchise on 
the other hand was the direct work of the aristocracy. Economic 
changes were in fact fast widening the franchise in the counties 
when the great landowners jealously interfered to curtail it. The 
number of freeholders had increased with the subdivision of estates and 
the social changes which we have already examined, while the increase 
of independence was marked by the " riots and divisions between the 
gentlemen and other people," which the nobles attributed to the exces- 
sive number of the voters. Matters were in this state when by an 
early Act of the reign ef Henry the Sixth the right of voting in shires 
was restricted to freeholders holding land worth forty shillings (a sum 
equal in our money to at least twenty pounds) a year, and representing 
a far higher proportional income at the present time. This "great 
disfranchising statute," as it has been justly termed, was aimed, in its 
own words, against voters "of no value, whereof every of them 
pretended to have a voice equivalent with the more v*^orthy knights 
and esquires dwelling within the same counties." But in actual work- 
ing the statute was interpreted in a far more destructive fashion than 
its words were intended to convey. Up to this time all suitors who 
found themselves at the Sheriffs Court had voted without question for 
the Knight of the Shire, but by the new statute the great bulk of 
the existing voters, that is to say the leaseholders and copyholders, 
found themselves implicitly deprived of their franchise. A later 
statute, which seems, however, to have had no practical effect, showed 
the aristocratic temper, as well as the social changes against which it 



I 



VI. i 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



267 



struggled, in its requirement that every Knight of the Shire should be 
" a gentleman born." The restriction of the suffrage was soon followed 
by its corruption in the '^ management" of elections. The complaint 
of the Kentish-men in Cade's revolt alleges that " the people of the 
shire are not allowed to have their free election in the choosing of 
knights for the shire, but letters have been sent from divers estates 
to the great mlers of all the county, the which enforceth their tenants 
and other people by force to choose other persons than the common 
will is." 

The death of Henry the Fifth revealed in its bare reality the 
secret of power. The whole of the royal authority vested without a 
i>truggle in a council composed of great lords and Churchmen repre- 
senting the baronage, at vv^hose head stood Henry Beaufort, Bishop 
of Chichester, a legitimated son of John of Gaunt by his mistress 
Catherine Swynford. In the presence of Loliardism, the Church had 
at this time ceased to be a great political power and sunk into a mere 
section of the landed aristocracy. Its one aim was to preserve its 
enormous wealth, which was threatened at once by the hatred of the 
heretics and by the greed of the nobles. Loliardism still lived, in 
spite of the steady persecution, as a spirit of revolt ; and nine years 
after the young King's accession we find the Duke of Gloucester 
traversing England with men-at-arms for the purpose of repressing 
its risings and hindering the circulation of its invectives against the 
clergy. The greed of the nobles had been diverted, whether, as later 
legend said, by the deliberate device of the great Churchmen or no, 
to the fair field of France. For the real source of the passion with 
which the baronage pressed for war was sheer lust of gold. What- 
ever pulse of patriotism may have stirred the blood of the English 
archer at Agincourt, the aim of the English noble was simply plunder, 
the pillage of farms, the sack of cities, the ransom of captives. So 
intense was the greed of gain that only a threat of death could keep 
the fighting men in their ranks, and the results of victory after victory 
were lost by the anxiety of the conquerors to deposit their plunder and 
captives safely at home before reaping the more military fruits of their 
success. The moment the firm hand of great leaders such as Henry 
or Bedford was removed, the war died down into mere massacre and 
brigandage. " If God had been a captain now-a-days," exclaimed a 
French general, " He would have turned marauder." Cruelty went 
hand-in-hand with greed, and we find an English privateer coolly pro- 
posing to drown the crews of a hundred merchant vessels which he has 
taken, unless the council to whom he writes should think it better to 
spare their lives. The nobles were as lawless and dissolute at home 
as they were greedy and cruel abroad. The Parhaments, which had 
now become mere sittings of their retainers and partizans, were like 
armed camps to which the great lords came with small armies at their 



t6$ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



backs. That of 1426 received its name of the " Club Parliament,^* 
from the fact that when arms were prohibited the retainers of the 
barons appeared with clubs on their shoulders. When clubs were 
forbidden, they hid stones and balls of lead in their clothes. The 
dissoluteness against which Lollardism had raised its great moral 
protest reigned now without a check. A gleam of intellectual light 
was breaking on the darkness of the time, but only to reveal its 
hideous combination of mental energ)^ with moral worthlessness. The 
Duke of Gloucester, whose love of letters was shown in the noble 
library he collected, was the most selfish and profligate prince of his 
day. The Earl of Worcester, a patron of Caxton, and one of the 
earliest scholars of the Revival of Letters, earned his title of 
"butcher" by the cruelty which raised him to a pre-eminence of 
infamy among the bloodstained leaders of the Wars of the Roses. 
All spiritual life seemed to have been trodden out in the ruin of the 
Lollards. Never had English literature fallen so low. A few tedious 
moralists alone preserved the name of poetry. History died down 
into the barest and most worthless fragments and annals. Even the 
religious enthusiam of the people seemed to have spent itself, or to 
have been crushed out by the bishops' courts. The one behef of the 
time was in sorcery and magic. Eleanor Cobham, the wife of the 
Duke of Gloucester, was convicted of having practised magic against 
the King's life with the priests of her household, and condemned to do 
penance in the streets of London. The shrivelled arm of Richard 
the Third was attributed to witchcraft. The mist which v/rapt the 
battle-field of Barnet was attributed to the incantations of Friar 
Bungay. The one pure figure which rises out of the greed, the lust, 
the selfishness, and unbelief of the time, the figure of Joan of Arc, was 
regarded by every Englishman as that of a sorceress. 

Jeannette d'Arc was the child of a labourer of Domremy, a little 
village in the neighbourhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine 
and Champagne, in other words of France and of the Empire. Just 
without the little cottage where she was born began the great woods of 
the Vosges, where the children of Domremy drank in poetry and 
legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their flower garlands on 
the sacred trees, and sang songs to the " good people " who might not 
drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne loved the forest ; 
its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her childish call. But at 
home men saw nothing in her but " a good girl, simple and pleasant 
in her ways," spinning and sewing by her mother's side while the 
other girls went to the fields, tender to the poor and sick, fond of 
church, and listening to the church-bell with a dreamy passion of 
delight which never left her. The quiet life was soon broken by the 
storm of war as it at last came home to Domremy. The death of 
Charles the Sixth, which followed hard on that of Henry, greatly 



I 



VL] 



THE ISfElV MOISTARCHY, 



269 



weakened the moral force of the English cause ; and the partizans of 
the Dauphin, who still held his ground south of the Loire, pushed their 
incursions over the river with fresh vigour as they received reinforce- 
ments of Lombards from the Milanese, and of four thousand Scots 
who landed at Rochelle under the Earl of Douglas. In genius for 
war, however, and in political capacity, the Duke of Bedford, who 
had taken the command in France on his brother's death, was hardly 
inferior to Henry himself. Drawing closer by a patient diplomacy his 
aUiances with the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, he completed the 
conquest of Northern France, secured his communication with Nor- 
mandy by the capture of Meulan, made himself master of the line of 
the Yonne by a victory near Auxerre, and pushed forward into the 
country near Macon. It was to arrest his progress that the Constable 
of Buchan advanced boldly from the Loire to the very borders of 
Normandy and attacked the English army at Verneuil. But a repulse 
hardly less disastrous than that of Agincourt left a third of the French 
knighthood on the field ; and the Regent was preparing to cross the 
Loire when he was hindered by the intrigues of his brother the Duke of 
Gloucester. The nomination of Gloucester to the Regency in England 
by the will of the late King had been set aside by the council, and 
sick of the powerless Protectorate with which they had invested him, 
the Duke sought a new opening for his restless ambition in a marriage 
with Jacqueline, the Countess in her own right of Holland and 
Hainault. The match at once roused the jealousy of the Duke of 
Burgundy, who regarded himself as the heir of her dominions, and 
the efforts of Bedford were paralysed by the withdrawal of his allies 
as they marched northward to combat his brother. For three years 
the council strove in vain to put an end to the ruinous struggle, 
during which Bedford was forced to remain simply on the defensive, 
till the failure of Gloucester again restored to him the aid of Burgundy, 
and he was once more able to push forward to the conquest of the 
South. The dela}^, however, brought little help to France, and the 
Dauphin saw Orleans invested by ten thousand of the allies without 
power to march to its relief. The war had long since reached the 
borders of Lorraine, and the family of Jeanne had more than once 
been forced to fly to the woods before bands of marauders, and find 
their home burnt and sacked on their return. The whole North of 
France, indeed, from the Lorraine to the German border was being 
fast reduced to a desert. The husbandmen fled for refuge to the 
toAvns, till these in fear of famine shut their gates against them. Then 
in their despair they threw themselves into the woods and became 
brigands in their turn. So terrible was the devastation, that the two 
contending armies at one time failed even to find one another in the 
desolate Beauce. The towns were in hardly better case, for misery 
and disease killed a hundred thousand people in Paris alone. As the 



270 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



outcasts and wounded passed by Domremy the young peasant girl gave 
them her bed and nursed them in their sickness. Her whole nature 
summed itself up in one absorbing passion : she '^ had pity," to use the 
phrase for ever on her lip, " on the fair realm of France." As her 
passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid from the Lorraine 
border should save the land ; she saw visions ; St. Michael appeared 
to her in a flood of blinding light, and bade her go to the help of the 
King and restore to him his realm. " Messire," answered the girl, " I 
am but a poor maiden ; I know not how to ride to the wars, or to lead 
men-at-arms." The archangel returned to give her courage, and to 
tell her of " the pity" that there was in heaven for the fair realm of 
France. The girl wept, and longed that the angels v/ho appeared to 
her would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain 
that her father when he heard her purpose swore to drown her ere she 
should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain that the priest, 
the wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted 
and refused to aid her. '^I must go to the King," persisted the peasant 
girl, " even if I wear my limbs to the very knees." ** I had far ratheri 
rest and spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a touching pathos,W 
" for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my 
Lord wills it." "And who," they asked, "is your Lord?" "He is 
God." Words such as these touched the rough captain at last : hi 
took Jeanne by the hand and swore to lead her to the King. At the 
Court itself she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved 
from their books that they ought not to believe her. " There is more 
in God's book than in yours," Jeanne answered simply. At last the 
Dauphin received her in the midst of a throng of nobles and soldiers, 
" Gentle Dauphin," said the girl, " my name is Jehan the Maid. The 
Heavenly King sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and 
crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant of the 
Heavenly King who is the King of France." 

Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of surrender 
when Jeanne appeared in the French Court. Charles had done 
nothing for its aid but shut himself up at Chinon and weep helpr 
lessly. The long series of English victories had in fact so demoralized 
the French soldiery that a mere detachment of archers under Sir 
John Fastolfe had repulsed an army, in what was called the " Battle 
of the Herrings," and conducted the convoy of provisions to which it 
owed its name in triumph into the camp before Orleans. Only two 
or three thousand Englishmen remained there in the trenches after 
new withdrawal of their Burgundian allies, but though the town 
swarmed with men-at-arms not a single sally had been ventured upon 
during the six months' siege. The success however of the handful of 
English besiegers depended wholly on the spell of terror which they 
had cast over France, and the appearance of Jeanne at once broke the 



It 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



I'ji 



spelL The girl was in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all 
the vigour and activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn 
to nightfall on horseback without meat or drink. As she mounted her 
charger, clad in white armour from head to foot, with the great white 
banner studded with fleur-de-lys waving over her head, she seemed 
" a thing wholly divine, whether to see or hear/^ The ten thousand 
men-at-arms who followed her from Chinon, rough plunderers whose 
only prayer was that of La Hire, " Sire Dieu, I pray you to do for La 
Hire what La Hire would do for you, were you captain-at-arms and he 
God," left off their oaths and foul living at her word and gathered 
round the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humour helped 
her to manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their 
camp-fires at the old warrior who had been so puzzled by her pro- 
hibition of oaths that she suffered him still to swear by his baton. In 
the midst of her enthusiasm her good sense never left her. The people 
crowded round her as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and 
bringing crosses and chaplets to be blest by her touch. " Touch them 
yourself,'^ she said to an old Dame Margaret ; "your touch will be just 
as good as mine." But her faith in her mission remained as firm as 
ever. "The Maid prays and requires you," she wrote to Bedford, "to 
work no more distraction in France, but to come in her company to 
rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk." " I bring you," she told 
Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans to meet her, " the best aid 
ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of Heaven." The besiegers 
looked on overawed as she led her force unopposed through their lines 
into Orleans, and, riding round the walls, bade the people look fearlessly 
on the dreaded forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove 
the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the 
enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort after 
fort was taken, till only the Tournelle remained, and then the council 
of war resolved to adjourn the attack. " You have taken your counsel," 
rephed Jeanne, " and I take mine." Placing herself at the head of 
the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led 
them against the fort. Few as they were, the English fought des- 
perately, and the Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavour- 
ing to scale its walls, v/as borne into a vineyard, while Dunois 
sounded the retreat. "Wait a while !" the girl imperiously pleaded, 
" eat and drink ! so soon as my standard touches the wall you shall 
enter the fort." It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the 
next day the siege was abandoned, and the force which had con- 
ducted it withdrew in good order to the North. In the midst of her 
triumph Jeanne still remained the pure, tender-hearted peasant girl of 
the Vosges. Her first visit as she entered Orleans was to the great 
church, and there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a passion of 
devotion that " all the people wept with her." Her tears burst forth 



272 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the corpses strewn over 
the battle-field. She grew frightened at her first wound, and only 
threw oft the touch of womanly fear when she heard the signal for 
retreat. Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed 
through the brutal warriors of a mediaeval camp. It was her care for 
her honour that had led her to clothe herself in a soldier's dress. She 
wept hot tears when told of the foul taunts of the English, and called 
passionately on God to witness her chastity. " Yield thee, yield thee, 
Gledstane,'^ she cried to the English warrior whose insults had been 
foulest, as he fell wounded at her feet, " you called me harlot ! I have 
great pity on your soul." But all thought of herself was lost in the 
thought of her mission. It. was in vain that the French generals strove 
to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was resolute to complete her task, 
and while the English remained panic-stricken around Paris the army 
followed her from Gien through Troyes, growing in number as it 
advanced, till it reached the gates of Rheims. With the coronation of 
the Dauphin the Maid felt her errand to be over. " O gentle King, the 
pleasure of God is done,'' she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of 
Charles the Seventh and asked leave to go home. " Would it were 
His pleasure," she pleaded with the Archbishop as he forced her to 
remain, " that I might go and keep sheep once more with my sisters 
and my brothers : they would be so glad to see me again ! " 

The policy of the French Court detained her while the cities 
of the North of France opened their gates to the newly-consecrated 
King. Bedford, however, who had been left without money or 
men, had now received reinforcements, and Charles, after a repulse 
before the walls of Paris, fell back behind the Loire ; while the towns on 
the Oise submitted again to the Duke of Burgundy. In this later 
struggle Jeanne fought with her usual bravery, but with the fatal 
consciousness that her mission was at an end, and during the defence 
of Compiegne she fell into the hands of the Bastard of Vendome, to 
be sold by her captor into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy and by 
the Duke into the hands of the English. To the English her triumphs 
were victories of so'rcery, and after a year's imprisonment she was 
brought to trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court 
with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head. Throughout the long 
process which followed every art was Employed to entangle her in her 
talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the efforts 
of her judges. " Do you believe," they asked, " that you are in a state 
of peace ?" " If I am not," she repUed, " God will put me in it. If I 
am, God will keep me in it." Her capture, they argued, showed that 
God had forsaken her. " Since it has pleased God that I should be 
taken," she answered meekly, "it is for the best." "Will you sub- 
mit," they demanded at last, "to the judgment of the Church 
Militant ?" " I have come to the King of France," Jeanne replied.. 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



273 



"by commission from God and from the Church Triumphant above : 
to that Church I submit." " I had far rather die/' she ended, pas- 
sionately, " than renounce what I have done by my Lord's command." 
They deprived her of mass. " Our Lord can make me hear it without 
your aid," she said, weeping. " Do your voices," asked the judges, 
" forbid you to submit to the Church and the Pope ? " " Ah, no ! Our 
Lord first served." Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no 
wonder that as the long trial dragged on and question followed 
question Jeanne's firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and 
diabolical possession she still appealed firmly to God. " I hold to my 
Judge," she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, "to 
the King of Heaven and Earth. God has always been my Lord in 
all that I have done. The devil has never had power over me." It 
was only with a view to be delivered from the English prison and 
transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal 
abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among the English soldiery 
those outrages to her honour, to guard against which she had from the 
first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress 
was a crime and she abandoned it ; but a renewed insult forced her to 
resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it was treated as 
a relapse into heresy which doomed her to death. A great pile was 
raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue stands now. Even 
the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated " witch " from the hands of 
the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached 
the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made 
from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. " Oh ! Rouen, 
Rouen," she was heard to murmur, as her eyes ranged over the city 
from the lofty scaffold, " I have great fear lest you suffer for my death." 
" Yes ! my voices were of God ! " she suddenly cried as the last 
moment came ; " they have never deceived me ! " Soon the flames 
reached her, the girl's head sunk on her breast, there was one cry of 
"Jesus !" — "We are lost," an English soJdier muttered as the crowd 
broke up, " we have burned a Saint." 

The English cause was indeed irretrievably lost. In spite of a 
pompous coronation of their boy-king at Paris, Bedford, with the cool 
wisdom of his temxper, seems to have abandoned all hope of per- 
manently retaining France, and to have fallen back on his brother's 
original plan of securing Normandy. Henry's Court was established 
for a year at Rouen, a university founded at Caen, and whatever 
rapine and disorder might be permitted elsewhere, justice, good 
government, and security for trade were resolutely maintained through 
the favoured province. At home Bedford was resolutely backed by 
the Bishop of Winchester, who had been raised to the rank of Cardinal, 
and who still governed England through the Royal council in spite of 

His immense wealth 



274 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



was poured without stint into the exhausted Treasury ; his loans to the 
Crown amounted to half-a-million ; and the army which he had raised 
at his own cost for the Hussite Crusade in Bohemia was unscru- 
pulously diverted to the relief of Bedford after the delivery of Orleans. 
The CardinaFs diplomatic ability was seen in the truces he wrung from 
Scotland, and in his personal efforts to prevent the reconciliation of 
Burgundy with France. But the death of Bedford was a death-blow to 
the English cause. Burgundy allied itself with Charles the Seventh ; 
Paris, after a sudden revolt, surrendered to the King ; and the English 
dominions were at once reduced to Normandy and the fortresses of 
Picardy, Maine, and Anjou. To preserve these the English soldiers, 
shrunk as they were to a mere handful, struggled with a bravery as 
desperate as in their days of triumph. Lord Talbot, the most daring 
of their chiefs, forded the Somme with the waters up to his chin t< 
relieve Crotoy, and threw his men across the Oise in the face of 
French army to relieve Pontoise. But in spite of these efforts an( 
of the pressure of the war-party at home, the great Churchmen, whOj 
though weakened by Beaufort's retirement, still remained at the heac 
of affairs, saw that success was no longer possible. They offered in' 
vain to fall back on the terms of the Treaty of Bretigny ; and after the 
expiration of a short truce, which they purchased by the release 
of the Duke of Orleans, a fresh effort for peace was made by the 
Earl of Suffolk, who had now become the minister of Henry the 
Sixth, and negotiated for his master a marriage with Marguerite of 
Anjou. Her father, Ren^, the titular King of Sicily and Jerusalem, 
was also nominally Duke of the provinces of Maine and Anjou, and 
these were surrendered by the English minister as the price of a 
match which Suffolk regarded as the prelude to a final peace. A 
terrible crime secured the peace party from the opposition of the Duke 
of Gloucester, who had resumed his old activity on the retirement of 
Cardinal Beaufort and had now placed himself at the head of the 
partizans of the war ; he was summoned to attend a Parliament at 
St. Edmondsbury, charged with high treason, and a few days after 
found dead in his bed. But the difficulties he had raised foiled 
Suffolk in his negotiations ; and though Charles extorted the sur- 
render of Le Mans by a threat of war, the provisions of the treaty 
remained for the most part unfulfilled. The struggle, however, now 
became a hopeless one. In two months from the resumption of the 
war half Normandy was in the hands of Dunois ; Rouen rose against 
her feeble garrison and threw open her gates to the King ; and 
the defeat of three thousand Englishmen who had landed at Four- 
migny was the signal for revolt throughout the rest of the province. 
The surrender of Cherbourg left Henry not a foot of ground in 
Normandy, but the views of the French monarch reached south of 
the Loire, where Guienne was still loyal to the English Crown, But 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



275 



not a man arrived for its defence ; and the surrender of fortress after 
fortress secured the final expulsion of the English from the soil of 
France. The Hundred Years' War had ended, not only in the loss 
of the temporary conquests made since the time of Edward the 
Third, with the exception of Calais, but in the loss of the great 
southern province which had remained in Enghsh hands ever since 
the marriage of its Duchess, Eleanor, to Henry the Second, and 
in the building up of France into a far greater power than it had ever 
been before. 

Section II.— The W^ars of the Roses. 1450— 14-71. 

[Authorities, — No period, save the last, is scantier in historical authorities. 
We still possess William of Worcester, Fabyan, and the Croyland Continuator, 
and for the struggle between Warwick and Edward, the valuable narrative of 
"The Arrival of Edward the Fourth," edited by Mr. Bruce for the Camden 
Society, which may be taken as the official account on the royal side. ** The 
Past on Letters " (now admirably edited by Mr. Gardner) are the first instance 
in England of a distinct family correspondence, and throw great light on the 
social history of the time. Cade's rising has been illustrated in two papers, 
lately reprinted, by Mr. Durrant Cooper. The Rolls of Parliament are, as 
before, of the highest value.] 



The ruinous issue of the great struggle with France roused England 
to a burst of fury against the wretched government to whose weakness 
and credulity it attributed its disasters. Suffolk was impeached and 
murdered as he fled across sea. The Bishop of Chichester, who had 
negotiated the cession of Anjou, was seized by the populace and torn 
to pieces. In Kent, the great manufacturing district of the day, seeth- 
ing with a busy population, and especially concerned with the French 
contest through the piracy of the Cinque Ports where eveiy house 
showed some spoil from the wars, the discontent broke into open 
revolt. Yeomen and tradesmen formed the bulk of the insurgents, 
but they were joined by more than a hundred esquires and gentlemen, 
and two great landowners of Suffolk, the Abbot of Battle and the 
Prior of Lewes, openly favoured their cause. John Cade, a soldier of 
some experience in the French wars, was placed at their head, and 
the army, now twenty thousand men strong, marched in Whitsun-week 
on Blackheath. The " Complaint of the Commons of Kent," which 
they laid before the Royal Council is of enormous value in the light 
which it throws on the condition of the people. So utterly had 
Lollardism been extinguished that not one of the demands touches 
on religious reform. The old social discontent seems to have subsided. 
The question of villainage and serfage, which had roused Kent 
to its desperate rising in 1381, finds no place in its "Complaint'' of 
1450. In the seventy years which had intervened, villainage had died 

T 2 



27^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. II. 
The Wars 

OF THE 

Roses. 
14.50- 
14.71. 



York and 
th3 Beau- 
forts. 



naturally away before the progress of social change. The Statutes 
of Apparel, which begin at this time to encumber the Statute-Book, 
show in their anxiety to curtail the dress of the labourer and the 
farmer the progress of these classes in comfort and wealth ; and from 
the language of the statutes themselves, it is plain that as wages rose 
both farmer and labourer went on clothing themselves better in spite 
of sumptuary provisions. With the exception of a demand for the re- 
peal of the Statute of Labourers, the programme of the Commons was 
now not social, but political. The " Complaint " calls for adminis- 
trative and economical reforms, for a change of ministry, a more care- 
ful expenditure of the royal revenue, and, as we have seen, for the 
restoration of freedom of election, which had been broken in upon 
by the interference both of the Crown and the great landowners. 
The refusal of the Council to receive the " Complaint '^ was followed 
by a victory of the Kentishmen over the Royal forces at Sevenoaks ; 
and the occupation of London, coupled with the execution of 
Lord Say, the most unpopular of the Royal ministers, broke the 
obstinacy of his colleagues. The " Complaint " was received, and 
pardons granted to all who had joined in the rising ; but the in- 
surgents were hardly dispersed to their homes, when Cade, who 
had striven in vain to retain them in arms, was pursued and slain as 
he fled into Sussex. No bloody retaliation followed on the death of 
the chief of the revolt, but the " Complaint '^ was quietly laid aside, 
and the Duke of Somerset, who was especially regarded as responsible 
for tiie late misgovernment, resumed his place at the head of the 
Royal Council. 

Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, as the descendant of John of Gaunt 
and his mistress Catherine Swynford, was the representative of a 
junior branch of the House of Lancaster, excluded indeed from the 
throne by a special clause in the Act which legitimatized their line, 
but whose hopes of the Crown were now roused by the childlessness 
of Henry the Sixth. It was probably, a suspicion of their designs 
which stirred the Duke of York to action. In addition to other 
claims which he as yet refrained from urging, he claimed as the 
descendant of Edmund of Langley, the fifth among the sons of 
Edward the Third, to be regarded as heir presumptive to the throne. 
His claim seems to have been a popular one, and on the interruption of 
the struggle between the two rivals by the severe malady of the King 
who sank for a year into absolute incapacity, the vote of Parliament 
appointed York Protector of the Realm. On Henry's recovery, how- 
ever, the Duke of Somerset, who had been impeached and committed 
to the Tower by his rival, was restored to power, and supported with 
singular vigour and audacity by the Queen. York at once took up 
arms, and backed by some of the most powerful nobles, advanced^ 
with 3,000 men upon St. Albans where Henry was encamped 



J 



VI, J 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



277 



successful assault upon the town was crowned by the fall of Somerset, 
and a return of the King's malady brought the renewal of York's 
Protectorate. Henry's recovery, however, again restored the supre- 
macy of the House of Beaufort, and after a temporary reconciliation 
between the two parties York again raised his standard at Ludlow, 
where he was joined by the Earls of Sahsbury and Warwick, the 
heads of the great house of Neville. After a slight success gained over 
Lord Audley at Bloreheath, the King marched rapidly on the insurgents, 
and a decisive battle was only averted by the desertion of a part of 
the Yorkist army and the disbandment of the rest. The Duke him- 
self fled to Ireland, the Earls to Calais, while the Queen, summoning 
a Parliament at Coventry, pressed on their attainder. But the check, 
whatever its cause, had been merely a temporary one. In the follow- 
ing Midsummer the Earls again landed in Kent, and backed by a 
general rising of the county, entered London amidst the acclamations 
of its citizens. The Royal army was defeated in a hard-fought action 
at Northampton, Margaret fled to Scotland, and Henry was left a 
prisoner in the hands of the Duke of York. 

The position of York as heir presumptive to the crown had ceased 
with the birth of a son to Henry the Sixth ; but the victory of 
Northampton no sooner raised him to the supreme control of 
affairs than he ventured to assert the far more dangerous claims which 
he had secretly cherished, and to its consciousness of which was 
owing the bitter hostility of the Royal House. As the descendant of 
Edmund of Langley he stood only next in succession to the House of 
Lancaster, but as the descendant of Lionel, the elder brother of 
John of Gaunt, he stood in strict hereditary right before it. We 
have already seen how the claims of Lionel had passed to the House 
of Mortimer : it was through Anne, the heiress of the Mortimers, who 
had wedded his father, that they passed to the Duke. There was, 
however, no constitutional ground for any limitation of the right of 
Parliament to set aside an elder branch in favour of a younger, and in 
the Parliamentary Act which placed the House of Lancaster on the 
throne the claim of the House of Mortimer had been deliberately 
set aside. Possession, too, told against the Yorkist pretensions. 
To modern minds the best reply to their claim lay in the words used 
at a later time by Henry himself. *' My father was King ; his father 
also was King ; I myself have worn the crown forty years from my 
cradle ; you have all sworn fealty to me as your sovereign, and your 
fathers have done the like to mine. How then can my right be 
disputed ? " Long and undisturbed possession, as well as a distinctly 
legal title by free vote of ParHament, was in favour of the House of 
Lancaster. But the persecution of the Lollards, the disfranchisement 
of the voter, the interference with elections, the odium of the 
war, the shame of the long mis-government told fatally against the 



278 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



weak and imbecile King, whose reign had been a long battle of con- 
tending factions. That the misrule had been serious was shown by the 
attitude of the commercial class. It was the vising of Kent, the 
great manufacturing district of the realm, which brought about the 
victory of Northampton. Throughout the struggle which followed 
London and the great merchant towns were steady for the House of 
York. Zeal for the Lancastrian cause was found only in the wild 
Welsh border-lands or in the yet wilder districts of the North and 
the West. It is absurd to suppose that the shrewd traders of Cheap- 
side were moved by an abstract question of hereditary right, or that 
the rough borderers of the Marches believed themselves to be sup- 
porting the right of Parliament to regulate the succession. But it marks 
the power which Parliament had now gained that the Duke of York felt 
himself compelled to convene the two Houses, and to lay his claim 
before the Lords as a petition of right. Neither oaths nor the numerous 
Acts which had settled and confirmed the right to the crown in the 
House of Lancaster could destroy, he pleaded, his hereditary claim.. 
The baronage received the petition with hardly concealed reluctance, 
and solved the question, as they hoped, by a compromise. They 
refused to dethrone the King, but they had sworn no fealty to his child, 
and at Henry's death they agreed to receive the Duke as successor to 
the crown. But the open display of York's pretensions at once 
united the partizans of the Royal House, and the deadly struggle 
which received the name of the Wars of the Roses, from the white 
rose which formed the badge of the House of York and the red rose 
which was the cognizance of the House of Lancaster, begun in the 
gathering of the North round Lord Clifford and of the West round the 
new Duke of Somerset. York, who had hurried to meet the first with 
a far inferior force, was defeated and captured at Wakefield, and the 
passion of civil war broke fiercely out on the field. The Duke was 
hurried to the block, and his head, crowned in mockery with a diadem 
of paper, is said to have been impaled on the walls of York. His boy. 
Lord Rutland, fell crying for mercy on his knees before Clifford. But 
Clifford's father had been the first to fall in the battle of St. Albans 
which opened the struggle. " As your father killed mine," cried the 
savage Baron while he plunged his dagger in the boy's breast, '* I will 
kill you ! " A force of Kentishmen under the Earl of Warwick barred 
the march of the conquerors on London, but after a desperate struggle 
at St. Albans the Yorkist forces broke under cover of night. An im- 
mediate march on the capital would have decided the contest, but the 
conquerors paused to sully their victory by a series of bloody execu- 
tions, and the rough northerners, whom Margaret had brought up, 
scattered to pillage, while Edward, Earl of March, the son of the late 
Duke of York, who had cut his way through a body of Lancastrians at 
Mortimer's Cross, struck boldly upon London. The citizens rallied at 



» 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



279 



his call and cries of " Long live King Edward'' rang round the hand- 
some young leader as he rode through the streets. A council of Yorkist 
lords, hastily summoned, resolved that the compromise agreed on in 
Parhament was at an end and that Henry of Lancaster had forfeited the 
throne. The final issue, however, now lay, not with Parliament, but 
with the sword. Disappointed of London, the Lancastrian army fell 
rapidly back on the North, and Edward hurried as rapidly in pursuit. 

The two armies encountered one another at Towton Field, near 
Tadcaster. In the numbers engaged, as well as in the terrible obstinacy 
of the struggle, no such battle had been seen in England since the fight 
of Senlac. On either side the armies numbered nearly 60,000 men. 
The day had just broken when the Yorkists advanced through a thick 
snow-fall, and for six hours the battle raged with desperate bravery on 
either side. At one critical moment Warwick saw his men falter, and 
stabbing his horse before them, swore on the cross of his sword to live 
or die on the field. At last the Lancastrians slowly gave way, a river 
in their rear turned the retreat into a rout, and the flight and carnage, 
for no quarter was given on either side, went on through the night 
and the morrow. Of the conquered, Edward's herald counted more 
than 20,000 corpses on the field, and the losses of the conquerors 
were hardly less heavy. Six barons had fallen in the fight, the Earls 
of Devon and Wiltshire were taken and beheaded at its close ; an 
enormous bill of attainder wrapt in the same ruin and confiscation all 
the nobles who still adhered to the House of Lancaster, and the execu- 
tion of Lords Oxford and Aubrey gave a terrible significance to its 
clauses. The struggles of Margaret only served to bring fresh calamities 
on her adherents. A new rising in the North was crushed by the Earl 
of Warwick, and a legend which lights up the gloom of the time with 
a gleam of poetry told how the fugitive Queen, after escaping 
with difficulty from a troop of bandits, found a new brigand in the 
depths of the wood. With the daring of despair she confided to him 
her child. " I trust to your loyalty," she said, " the son of your King." 
Margaret and her child escaped over the border under the robber's 
guidance, but a new rising in the following year brought about the 
execution of Somerset and flung Henry into the hands of his enemies. 
His feet were tied to the stirrups, he was led thrice round the pillory, 
and then conducted as a prisoner to the Tower, 

Ruined as feudalism really was by the terrible bloodshed and con- 
fiscations of the civil war, it had never seemed so powerful as in the 
years which followed Towton. Out of the wreck of the baronage a 
family which had always stood high amongst its fellows towered into 
unrivalled greatness. Lord Warwick was by descent Earl of Salisbury, 
a son of the great noble whose support had been mainly instrumental in 
raising the House of York to the throne. He had doubled his wealth 
and influence by his acquisition of the Earldom of Warwick, through 



28o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



a marriage with the heiress of the Beauchamps. His services at . 
Towton had been munificently rewarded by the grant of vast estates . 
from the Lancastrian confiscations and by his elevation to the highest 
posts in the service of the State. He was governor of Calais, Lieu- 
tenant of Ireland, and Warden of the Western Marches. This personal 
power was backed by the power of the House of Neville, of which 
he was the head. Lords Falconberg, Abergavenny, and Latimer were 
his uncles. His brother, Lord Montagu, had received as his share in^j 
the spoil the Earldom of Northumberland, the estates of the Percies,* 
and the command of the Northern border. His younger brother, 
George, had been raised to the See of York and the of^ce of Lord 
Chancellor. At first sight the figure of Warwick strikes us as the 
very type of the feudal baron. He could raise armies at his call from 
his own earldoms. Six hundred liveried retainers followed him to 
Parliament. His fame as a military leader had been established by_^ 
the great victories which crushed the House of Lancaster, asBj 
well as by the crowning glory of Towton. Yet few men were ever^ 
further, in fact, from the feudal ideal. Active, skilful, ruthless warrior 
as he was, Warwick — if we believe his contemporaries — had little 
personal daring. In war he was rather general than soldier. His 
genius in fact was not so much military as diplomatic ; what he m ; 
excelled in was intrigue, treachery, the contrivance of plots, andBi 
sudden desertions. And in the boy-king whom he had raised to 
the throne he met not merely a consummate general, but a politician 
whose subtlety and rapidity of conception was destined to leave a 
deep and enduring mark on the character of the monarchy itself, j 
Edward was but nineteen at his accession, and both his kinship (fori 
he was the King^s cousin by blood) and his recent services rendered j 
Warwick during the first three years of his reign all-powerful in the State. 
But the final ruin of Henry's cause in the battle of Hexham gave the] 
signal for a silent struggle betv/een Edward and his minister. The! 
King^s first step was to avow his marriage with the v/idow of a slain 
Lancastrian, Dame Elizabeth Grey, and to raise her family to greatness 
as a counterpoise to the Nevilles. Her father, Lord Rivers, became 
Constable ; her son by the first marriage was wedded to the heiress 
of the Duke of Exeter, whom Warwick had demanded for his nephew. 
Warwick's policy lay in a close connection with France ; he had been 
cilready foiled in negotiating a French marriage for the King, and on his 
crossing the seas to conclude a marriage of the King's sister, Margaret, 
with one of the French princes, Edward availed himself of his 
absence to deprive his brother of the seals, and to wed his sister to 
the sworn enemy both of France and of Warwick, Charles the Bold, 
Duke of Burgundy. For the moment it seemed as if the King's ruii» 
was at hand. In spite of the Royal opposition, Warwick replied to 
Edward's challenge by the marriage of his daughter with the King's 



YL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



281 



brother, the Duke of Clarence, and a revolt which instantly broke 
out threw Edward into the hands of his great subject. The 
terms exacted as the price of the King's release transferred to 
the Nevilles the succession to the crown, for Edward was still 
without a son, and Warwick wrested from him the betrothal 
of his infant daughter to the son of Lord Montagu, the heir of his 
house. The EarFs ambition, however, was still unsatisfied, and he 
was advancing to support a new rising which had broken out at 
his instigation in Lincolnshire, when the rapid march of Edward was 
followed by a decisive victory over the insurgents. It is hopeless, 
with the scanty historical materials we possess of this period, 
to attempt to explain its sudden revolutions of fortune, or the panic 
which induced Warwick at this trivial check to fly for refuge to 
France, where the Burgundian connection of Edward secured his 
enemies the support of Louis the Eleventh. But the unscrupulous 
temper of the Earl was seen in the alliance which he at once con- 
cluded with the partizans of the House of Lancaster. On the promise 
of Queen Margaret to wed her son to his daughter Anne, Warwick 
engaged to restore the crown to the royal captive whom he had flung 
into the Tower ; and choosing a moment when Edward was busy with 
a revolt in the North and when a storm had dispersed the Burgundian 
fleet which defended the Channel, he threw himself boldly on the 
English shore. Kent rose in his support as he disembarked, and the 
desertion of Lord Montagu, whom Edward still trusted, drove the 
King in turn to seek shelter over sea. While Edward fled with a handful 
of adherents to the Court of Burgundy, Henry of Lancaster was again 
conducted from his prison to the throne, but the bitter hate of the party 
Warwick had so ruthlessly crushed found no gratitude for the " King- 
Maker." His own conduct, as well as that of his party, when Edward 
again disembarked in the spring at Ravenspur, showed a weariness 
of the new alliance, quickened perhaps by their dread of Margaret, 
whose return to England was hourly expected. Passing through the 
Lancastrian districts of the North with a declaration that he waived 
ail right to the crown and sought only his own hereditary duchy, 
Edward was left unassailed by an overwhelming force which Montagu 
had collected, was joined on his march by his brother Clarence who 
had throughout acted in concert with Warv/ick, and was admitted 
ijato London by Warwick's brother, the Archbishop of York. En- 
camped at Coventry, the Earl himself opened negotiations with Edward 
for a new desertion, but the King \vas now strong enough to fling off 
the mask, and Warwick, desperate of a reconciliation, marched sud- 
denly on London. The battle of Barnet, a medley of carnage and 
treachery which lasted six hours, ended with the fall of Warwick as he 
fled for hiding to the woods. Margaret had landed too late to bring 
aid to her great partizan^ but the military triumph of Edward was 



282 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



completed by the skilful strategy with which he forced her army to 
battle at Tewkesbury, and by its complete overthrow. The Queen 
herself became a captive ; her boy fell on the field, stabbed — as was 
affirmed — by the Yorkist lords after Edward had met his cry for 
mercy by a buffet from his gauntlet ; and the death of Henry in the 
Tower crushed the last hopes of the House of Lancaster. 

Section III.— The New Monarchy; 1^71-1509. 

[Authoriiies. — To those we have already mentioned, we may add the 
''Letters and Papers of Richard III. and Henry VII." edited by Mr. Gaird- 
ner for the Master of the Rolls, as well as Hall's Chronicle, which extends 
from Henry the Fourth to Henry the Eighth. Edward the Fifth is the subject 
of a work by Sir Thomas More, which probably derives much of its information 
from Archbishop Morton, and is remarkable as the first historical work of 
any literary value which we possess in our modern prose. A biography of 
Henry the Seventh is among the works of Lord Bacon. Miss Hasted, in her 
**Life of Richard III.,'' has elaborately illustrated a reign of some consti 
tutional importance. For Caxton, see the admirable biogi^aphy and bibliogra 
phical account by Mr. Blades.] 



There are few periods in our annals from which we turn with such 
weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses. Its thick crowd 
of savage battles, its ruthless executions, its shameless treasons seem 
all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men 
fought; the utter want of all nobleness and chivalry in the struggle itself, 
of all great result in its close. But even while the contest was raging 
the cool eye of a philosophic statesman could find in it matter for other 
feelings than those of mere disgust. England presented to Philippe de 
Commines the rare spectacle of a land where, brutal as was the civil 
strife, " there are no buildings destroyed or demolished by war, and 
where the mischief of it falls on those who make the war." The ruin 
and bloodshed were hmited, in fact, to the great lords and their feudal 
retainers. Once or twice indeed, as at Towton, the towns threw them- 
selves into the struggle on the Yorkist side, but for the most part the 
trading and industrial classes stood wholly apart from, and unaffected 
by it. Commerce went on unchecked, and indeed developed itself 
through the closer friendship with Flanders and the House of Bur- 
gundy more rapidly than at any former period. The general tranquillity 
of the country at large, while feudalism was dashing itself to pieces 
in battle after battle, was shown by the remarkable fact that justice 
remained wholly undisturbed. The law courts sate quietly at West- 
minster, the judges rode as of old in circuit, the system of jury-trial 
(though the jurors were still expected to use their local and personal 
knowledge of the case) took more and more its modern form by the 
separation of the jurors from the witnesses. But if the common view of 



l! 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



283 



England during these Wars as a mere chaos of treason and bloodshed 
is a false one, still more false is the common view of the pettiness of 
their result. The Wars of the Roses did far more than ruin one Royal 
House or set up another on the throne. If they did not utterly destroy 
Enghsh freedom, they arrested its progress for more than a hundred 
years. They found England, in the words of Commines, " among all 
the world's lordships of which I have knowledge, that where the 
public weal is best ordered, and where least violence reigns over the 
people." A King of England— the shrev/d observer noticed — *' can 
undertake no enterprise of account without assembling his Parliament, 
which is a thing most wise and holy, and therefore are these Kings 
stronger and better served '^ than the despotic sovereigns of the Conti- 
nent. England, as one of its judges, Sir John Fortescue, could boast 
to Edward the Fourth himself, v/as not an absolute but a limited 
monarchy ; not a land jvhere the will of the prince was itself the law, 
but where the prince could neither make laws nor impose taxes save 
by his subjects' consent. At no time had Parliament played so constant 
and prominent a part in the government of the realm. At no time had 
the principles of constitutional liberty seemed so thoroughly understood 
and so dear to the people at large. The long Parliamentary contest 
between the Crown and the two Houses since the days of Edward the 
First had firmly estabHshed the great securities of national liberty — the 
fight of freedom from arbitrary taxation, from arbitrary legislation, 
from arbitrary imprisonment, and the responsibility of even the highest 
servants of the Crown to Parliament and to the law. But with the 
close of the war of the Succession freedom suddenly disappears. We 
enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression in which the slow 
work of the age that went before it is rapidly undone. Parliamentar)' 
life is almost suspended, or is turned into a form by the overpowering 
influence of the Crown. The legislative powers of the two Houses 
are usurped by the Royal Council. Arbitrary taxation re-appears in 
benevolences and forced loans. Personal liberty is almost extin- 
guished by a formidable spy-system and by the constant practice of 
arbitrary imprisonment. Justice is degraded by the prodigal use of 
bills of attainder, by the wide extension of the judicial power of 
the Royal Council, by the servility of judges, by the coercion of 
juries. If we seek a reason for so sudden and complete a revolution, 
we find it in the disappearance of feudalism, in other words of that 
organization of society in w^hich our constitutional liberty had till now 
found its security. Freedom had been won by the sword of the 
Baronage. Its tradition had been watched over by the jealousy of 
the Church. The new class of the Commons which had grown from 
the union of the country squire and the town trader was widening 
its sphere of political activity as it grew. But with the battle of 
Towton feudalism vanished away. The baronage lay a mere wreck 



284 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



after the storm of the civil war. The Church lingered helpless and 
perplexed, till it was struck down by Thomas Cromwell. The 
traders and the smaller proprietors sank into political inactivity. 
On the other hand, the Crown, which only fifty years before had 
been the sport of every faction, towered into solitary greatness. 
The old English Kingship, limited by the forces of feudalism or by 
the progress of constitutional freedom, faded suddenly away, and 
in its place we see, all-absorbing and unrestrained, the despotism 
of the New Monarchy. 

If we use the name of the New Monarchy to express the character 
of the English sovereignty from the time of Edward the Fourth to 
the time of Elizabeth, it is because the character of the Monarchy 
during this period was something wholly new in our history. There 
is no kind of similarity between the Kingship of the Old-English, of 
the Norman, the Angevin, or the Plantagenet sovereigns, and the 
Kingship of the Tudors. The difference between them was the result, 
liot of any gradual development, but of a simple revolution ; and it 
was only by a revolution that the despotism of the New Monarchy! j 
was again done away. When the lawyers of the Long Parliament" 
fell back for their precedents of constitutional liberty to the reign 
of the House of Lancaster, and silently regarded the whole period 
which we are about to traverse as a blank, they expressed notj 
merely a legal truth but an historical one. What the Great Rebellionl 
in its final result actually did was to wipe away every trace of the! 
New Monarchy, and to take up again the thread of our political| 
development just where it had been snapt by the Wars of the Roses. 
But revolutionary as the change was, we have already seen in their ' 
gradual growth the causes which brought about the revolution. The 
social organization from which our political constitution had hitherto 
sprung and on which it still rested had been silently sapped by the 
progress of industry, by the growth of spiritual and intellectual en- 
lightenment, and by changes in the art of war. Its ruin was preci- 
pitated by religious persecution, by the disfranchisement of thejj, 
Commons, and by the slaughter of the Baronage in the civil strife.^' 
The great Houses were all but exterminated, or Hngered only in 
obscure branches which were mere shadows of their former greatness. 
With the exception of the Poles, the Stanleys, and the Howards, 
themselves families of recent origin, hardly a fragment of the older 
baronage remiained to claim any share in the work of government. 
Neither the Church nor the smaller proprietors of the country, who 
with the merchant classes formed the Commons, were ready to take 
the place of the ruined nobles. Imposing as the great ecclesiastical 
body still seemed from the memories of its past, its immense wealth, 
its tradition of statesmanship, it was rendered powerless by a want 
i of spiritual life^ by a moral inertness, by its antagonism to the deeper 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



28"; 



religious convictions of the people, and its blind hostility to the in- 
tellectual movement which v^as beginning to stir the world. Conscious 
of the want of popular favour and jealous only for the preservation 
of their vast estates, the Churchmen, who had clung for protection 
to the Baronage, clung on its fall for protection to the Crown. Prelates 
like Morton and Warham devoted themselves to the Royal Council- 
board with the simple view of averting by means of the Monarchy 
the pillage of the Church. But in any wider political sense the in- 
fluence of the body to which they belonged was insignificant. From 
the time of the Lollard outbreak the attitude of the Church is timid as 
that of a hunted thing. It is less obvious at first sight why the Commons 
should share the pohtical ruin of the Church and the Lords, for 
the smaller county proprietors were growing enormously, both in wealth 
and numbers, at this moment through the fall of the great Houses 
and the dispersion of their vast estates, while the burgess class, as 
we have seen, was deriving fresh riches from the development of 
trade. But the result of the narrowing of the franchise and of the 
tampering with elections was now felt in the political insignificance 
of the Lower House. Reduced by these measures to a virtual de- 
pendence on the Baronage, it fell with the fall of the class to which 
it looked for guidance and support. And while its rival forces dis- 
appeared, the Monarchy stood ready to take their place. Not only 
indeed were the Churchman, the squire, and the burgess powerless 
to vindicate liberty against the Crown, but the very interests of self- 
preservation led them at this moment to lay freedom at its feet. 
The Church still trembled at the progress of heresy. The close 
corporations of the towns needed protection for their privileges. The 
landowner shared with the trader a profound horror of the war and 
disorder which they had witnessed, and an almost reckless desire to 
entrust the Crown with any power which would prevent its return. 
But above all, the landed and monied classes clung passionately to the 
Monarchy, as the one great force left which could save them from 
social revolt. The rising of the Commons of Kent shows that the 
troubles against which the Statutes of Labourers had been directed 
still remained as a formidable source of discontent. The great change 
in the character of agriculture indeed, which we have before described, 
the throwing together of the smaller holdings, the diminution of 
tillage, the increase of pasture lands, had tended largely to swell 
the numbers and turbulence of the floating labour class. The riots 
against " enclosures," of which we first hear in the time of Henry the 
Sixth, and which became a constant feature of the Tudor period, are 
indications not only of a constant strife going on in every quarter 
between the landowner and the smaller peasant class, but of a mass 
of social discontent which was constantly seeking an outlet in 
violence and revolution. And at this moment the break up of the 



Sec. III. 

The New 
Monarchy 

1609. 



2S6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



military households of the nobles by the attainders and confiscations* 
of the Wars of the Roses, as well as by the Statute of Liveries 
which followed them, added a new element of violence and disorder to 
the seething mass. It is this social danger which lies at the root of 
the Tudor despotism. For the proprietary classes the repression of 
the poor was a question of life and death. The landowner and the 
merchant were ready, as they have been ready in all ages of the 
world, to surrender freedom into the hands of the one power which 
could preserve them from what they deemed to be anarchy. It was - 
to the selfish panic of the wealthier landowners that England owed 
the Statutes of Labourers, with their terrible heritage of a pauper 
class. It was to the selfish panic of both the landowner and the 
merchant that she owed the despotism of the New Monarchy. 

The founder of the New Monarchy was Edward the Fourth. As 
a mere boy he showed himself the ablest and the most pitiless among 
the warriors of the civil war. In the first flush of manhood he 
looked on with a cool ruthlessness while grey-haired nobles were 
hurried to the block, or while his Lancastrian child-rival was stabbed 
at his feet. In his later race for power he had shown himseLf 
more subtle in his treachery than even Warwick himself. His 
triumph was no sooner won however than the young King seemed 
to abandon himself to a voluptuous indolence, to revels with the city^ 
wives of London and the caresses of his mistress, Jane Shore. Tall 
in stature and of singular beauty, his winning manners and gay care^ 
lessness of bearing secured him a popularity which had been denied to 
nobler kings. But his indolence and gaiety were mere veils beneath 
which Edward shrouded a profound political ability. No one could 
contrast more utterly in outer appearance with the subtle sovereigns of 
his time, with Louis the Eleventh or Ferdinand of Arragon, but his 
work was the same as theirs, and it was done even more completely 
While jesting with aldermen, or dallying with his mistresses, or idling 
'over the new pages from the printing-press at Westminster, Edward 
was silently laying the foundations of an absolute rule which Henry 
the Seventh did little more than develop and consolidate. The 
almost total discontinuance of Parliamentary life was in itself a 
revolution. Up to this moment the two Houses had played a part 
which became more and more prominent in the government of the 
realm. Under the two first Kings of the House of Lancaster they had 
been summoned almost every year. Not only had the right of self- 
taxation and initiation of laws been yielded explicitly to the Commons, 
but they had taken part in the work of Government itself, had directed 
the application of subsidies and called the Royal ministers to account 
by Parliamentary impeachments. Under Henry the Sixth an im- 
portant step in constitutional progress had been made by abandoning 
the old form of presenting the requests of the Parliament in the form 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



287 



of petitions which were subsequently moulded into statutes by the 
Royal Council ; the statute itself, in its final form, was now presented 
for the Royal assent, and the Crown was deprived of its former 
privilege of modifying it. Not only does this progress cease, but the 
legislative activity of Parhament itself comes abruptly to an end. The 
reign of Edward the Fourth is the first since that of John in which 
not a single law which promoted freedom or remedied the abuses of 
power was even proposed to Parliament. The necessity for sum- 
moning the two Houses had, in fact, been removed by the enormous 
tide of wealth which the confiscations of the civil war poured into the 
Royal Treasury. In the single bill of attainder which followed the 
victory of Towton, twelve great nobles and more than a hundred 
knights and squires were stripped of their estates to the King^s profit. 
It was said that nearly a fifth of the land had passed into the Royal 
possession at one period or another of the civil war. Edward added 
to his resources by trading on a vast scale. The Royal ships, 
freighted with tin, v^^ool, and cloth, made the name of the merchant- 
king famous in the ports of Italy and Greece. The enterprises he 
planned against France, though frustrated by the refusal of Charles 
of Burgundy to co-operate with him in them, afforded a fresh 
financial resource ; and the subsidies granted for a war which 
never took place swelled the Royal exchequer. But the pretext of war 
enabled Edward not only to increase his hoard, but to deal a deadly 
blow at liberty. Setting aside the usage of loans sanctioned by 
the authority of Parliament, Edward called before him the mer- 
chants of the city and requested from each a present or " benevolence," 
in proportion to the need. Their compliance with his prayer was 
probably aided by his popularity with the merchant class, but the 
system of " benevolence ^' was soon to be developed into the forced 
loans of Wolsey and the Ship-money of Charles the First. It was 
to Edward that his Tudor successors ov/ed their elaborate spy-system^ 
the introduction of the rack into the Tower, and the practice of Royal 
interference with the purity of justice. In the history of intellectual 
progress alone his reign takes a brighter colour, and the founder of 
the New Monarchy presents his one solitary claim to our regard as 
the patron of Caxton. 

Literature indeed seemed at this moment to have died as utterly as 
freedom itself. The genius of Chaucer, and of the one or more 
poets whose works have been confounded with Chaucer's, defied for 
a while the pedantry, the affectation, the barrenness of their age ; 
but the sudden close of this poetic outburst left England to a 
crowd of poetasters, compilers, scribblers of interminable moralities, 
rimers of chronicles, and translators from the worn-out field of 
French romance. Some faint trace of the liveliness and beauty 
of older models lingers among the heavy platitudes of Gower, but 



The Net?,- 
Monarchy 

14-71- 
1509. 



Litera» 

ture 

after 

Chaucer. 



283 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec III. 

The New 
Monarchy. 

14-71- 
1509. 



even this vanished from the didactic puerilities, the prosaic com- 
monplaces, of Occleve and Lydgate. The literature of the 
Middle Ages was dying out with the Middle Ages themselves ; in 
letters as in life their thirst for knowledge had spent itself in the 
barren mazes of the scholastic philosophy, their ideal of warlike 
nobleness faded away before the gaudy travestie of a spurious 
chivalry, and the mystic enthusiasm of their devotion shrunk at 
the touch of persecution into a narrow orthodoxy and a flat 
morality. The clergy, who had concentrated in themselves the 
intellectual effort of the older time, were ceasing to be an intellectual 
class at all. Their monasteries were no longer seats of learning. 
" I found in them," said Poggio, an Italian traveller twenty years 
after Chaucer's death, "men given up to sensuality in abundance, 
but very few lovers of learning, and those of a barbarous sort, skilled 
more in quibbles and sophisms than in literature." The erection of 
colleges, which was beginning, could not arrest the quick dechne of 
the universities both in numbers and learning. The students at 
Oxford amounted to but a fifth of those who had attended its lectures 
a century before, and " Oxford Latin " became proverbial for a jargon 
in which the very tradition of grammar had been lost. All literary 
production was nearly at an end ; there is not a single work, for 
instance, either in Latin or English which we can refer to the ten 
years of the reign of Edward the Fourth. Historical composition 
lingered on indeed in compilations of extracts from past writers, 
such as make up the so-called works of Walsingham, in jejune 
monastic annals like those of St. Albans, or worthless popular com- 
pendiums like those of Fabyan and Harding. But the only real trace 
of mental activity is to be found in the numerous treatises on alchemy 
and magic, on the elixir of life or the philosopher's stone, the fungous 
growth which most unequivocally witnesses to the progress of intel- 
lectual decay. On the other hand, while the purely literary class was 
thus dying out, a glance beneath the surface shows us the stir of a 
new interest in knowledge among the masses of the people itself 
Books are far from being the only indication of a people's progress in 
knowledge, and the correspondence of the Paston family, which has 
been happily preserved, displays a fluency and vivacity as well as a 
grammatical correctness which would have been impossible in familiar 
letters a hundred years before. The very character of the authorship 
of the time, its love of compendiums and abridgements of the scientific 
and historical knowledge of its day, its dramatic performances or 
mysteries, the commonplace morality of its poets, the popularity of 
its rhymed chronicles are additional proofs that literature was ceasing 
to be the possession of a purely intellectual class and was now begin- 
ning to appeal to the people at large. The increased use of linen 
paper in place of the costlier parchment helped in the popularization 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



iSg 



of letters. In no former age had finer copies of books been pro- 
duced ; in none had so many been transcribed. Abroad this increased 
demand for their production caused the processes of copying and 
illuminating manuscripts to be transferred from the scriptoria of 
the religious houses into the hands of trade-guilds, like the Guild of 
St. John at Bruges, or the Brothers of the Pen at Brussels. It was, 
in fact, this increase of demand for books, pamphlets, or fly-sheets, 
especially of a grammatical or religious character, in the middle of 
the fifteenth century that brought about the introduction of printing. 
We meet with it first in rude sheets simply struck off from wooden 
blocks, " block-books " as they are now called, and later on in works 
printed from separate and moveable types. Originating at Maintz 
with the three famous printers, Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, the 
new process travelled southward to Strasburg, crossed the Alps to 
Venice, where it lent itself through the Aldi to the spread of 
Greek literature in Europe, and then floated down the Rhine to 
Cologne and the towns of 'Flanders. It was probably at the press 
• of Colard Mansion, in a little room over the porch of St. Donates at 
Bruges, that Caxton learnt the art which he was the first to introduce 
into England. 

A Kentish boy by birth, but apprenticed to a London Mercer, 
William Caxton had already spent thirty years of his manhood in 
Flanders, as Governor of the English guild of Merchant Adventurers 
there, when we find him engaged as copyist in the service of the 
Duchess of Burgundy. But the tedious process of copying was soon 
thrown aside for the new art which Colard Mansion had introduced 
into Bruges. '^ For as much as in the writing of the same," Caxton 
tells us in the preface to his first printed work, the Tales of Troy, "my 
pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, mine eyes dimmed with 
over much looking on the white paper, and my courage not so prone 
and ready to labour as it hath been, and that age creepeth on me 
daily and feebleth all the body, and also because I have promised 
to divers gentlemen and to my friends to address to them as hastily 
as I might the said book, therefore I have practised and learned at 
my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print after 
the manner and fonn as ye may see, and is not written with pen and 
ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them 
at once, for all the books of this story here emprynted as ye see 
v/ere begun in one day and also finished in one day." The printing 
press was the precious freight he brought back to England, after an 
absence of five-and-thirty years. Through the next fifteen, at an age 
when other men look for ease and retirement, we see him plunging 
with characteristic energy into his new occupation. His "red pole" 
invited buyers to the press established in the Almonry at Westminster, 
a little enclosure containing a chapel and almshouses (swept away 

U 



290 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

The New 
Monarchy. 

1471- 



Sainton's 
Transla- 
tions. 



since Caxton's time by later buildings) near the west front of the 
church, where the alms of the abbey were distributed to the poor. 
" If it please any man, spiritual or temporal/' runs his advertisement, 
^^ to buy any pyes of two or three commemorations of Salisbury all 
emprinted after the form of the present letter, which be well and truly 
correct, let him come to Westminster into the Almonry at the red 
pole, and he shall have them good chepe." He was a practical man 
of business, as this advertisement shows, no rival of the Venetian 
Aldi or of the classical printers of Rome, but resolved to g^t a living 
from his trade, supplying priests with service books, and preachers 
with sermons, furnishing the clerk with his '^ Golden Legend," and 
knight and baron with "joyous and pleasant histories of chivalry." 
But while careful to win his daily bread, he found time to do much 
for what of higher literature lay fairly to hand. He printed all the 
English poetry of any moment which was then in existence. His rever- 
ence for " that worshipful man, Geoffry Chaucer," who " ought eternally 
to be remembered," is shown not merely by his edition of the " Canter- 
bury Tales," but by his reprint of them when a purer text of the poem 
offered itself. The poems of Lydgate and Gower were soon added to 
those of Chaucer. The Chronicle of Brut and Higden's " Polychro- 
nicon " were the only available works of an historical character then 
existing in the English tongue, and Caxton not only printed them but 
himself continued the latter up to his own time. A translation of 
Boethius, a version of the Eneid from the French, and a tract or 
two of Cicero, were the stray first-fruits of the classical press in 
England. 

Busy as was Caxton's printing-press, he was even busier as a trans- 
lator than as a printer. More than four thousand of his printed pages 
are from works of his own rendering. The need of these translations 
shows the popular drift of literature at the time ; but keen as the 
demand seems to have been, there is nothing mechanical in the temper 
with which Caxton prepared to meet it. A natural, simple-hearted 
literary taste and enthusiasm, especially for the style and forms of 
language, breaks out in his curious prefaces. "Having no work in 
hand," he says in the preface to his Eneid, " I sitting in my study 
where as lay many divers pamphlets and books, happened that to my 
hand came a little book in French, which late was translated out of 
Latin by some noble clerk of France — which book is named Eneydos, 
and made in Latin by that noble poet and great clerk Vergyl— in 
which book I had great pleasure by reason of the fair and honest 
termes and wordes in French which I never saw to-fore-like, none 
so pleasant nor so well ordered, which book as me seemed should be 
much requisite for noble men to see, as well for the eloquence as 
the histories ; and when I had advised me to this said book I deliber- 
ated and concluded to translate it into English, and forthwith took 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



291 



a pen and ink and wrote a leaf or twain." But the work of transla- 
tion involved a choice of English which made Caxton's work impor- 
tant in the history of our language. He stood between two schools 
of translation, that of French affectation and English pedantry. It 
was a moment when the character of our literary tongue was being 
settled, and it is curious to see in his own words the struggle over 
it which was going on in Caxton's time. ^^ Some honest and great 
clerks have been with me and desired me to write the most curious 
terms that I could find;'' on the other hand, "some gentlemen of 
late blamed me, saying that in my translations I had over many 
curious terms which could not be understood of common people, and 
desired me to use old and homely terms in my translations." " Fain 
would I please every man," comments the good-humoured printer, but 
his sturdy sense saved him alike from the temptations of the court and 
the schools. His own taste pointed to Enghsh, but " to the common 
terms that be daily used" rather than to the English of his anti- 
quarian advisers. " I took an old book and read therein, and cer- 
tainly the English was so rude and broad I could HOt well understand 
it," while the Old-English charters which the Abbot of Westminster 
fetched as models from the archives of his house, seemed " more like 
to Dutch than to English." On the other hand, to adopt current* 
phraseology was by no means easy at a time when even the speech 
of common talk was in a state of rapid flux. " Our language now 
used varieth far from that which was used and spoken when I was 
bom." Not only so, but the tongue of each shire was still peculiar 
to itself, and hardly intelligible to men of another county. " Common 
English that is spoken in one shire varieth from another so m.uch, 
that in my days happened that certain merchants were in a ship in 
Thames, for to have sailed over the sea into Zealand, and for lack 
of wind they tarried at Foreland, and went on land for to refresh 
them. And one of them, named Sheffield, a mercer, came into a 
house and asked for meat, and especially he asked them after eggs. 
And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And 
the merchant was angr}^, for he also could speak no French, but would 
have had eggs, but she understood him not. And then at last another 
said he would have eyren, then the good wife said she understood him 
well. Lo ! what should a man in these days now write," adds the 
puzzled printer, " eggs or eyren ? certainly it is hard to please every- 
man by cause of diversity and change of language." His own mother- 
tongue, too was that of "Kent in the Weald, where I doubt not 
is spoken as broad and rude English as in any place of England ; " 
and coupling this with his long absence in Flanders, we can hardly 
wonder at the confession he makes over his first translation, that 
"when all these things came to fore me, after that I had miade 
and written a five or six quires, I fell in despair of this work, and 

U 2 



The Nev/ 
Monarchy^ 

14-71- 
1509. 



292 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



purposed never to have continued therein, and the quires laid apart^ 
and in two years after laboured no more in this work." 

He was still, however, busy translating when he died. All difficulties, 
in fact, were lightened by the general interest which his labours aroused. 
When the length of the " Golden Legend " makes him " half desperate 
to have accomplisht it " and ready to " lay it apart," the Earl of Arundel 
solicits him in nowise to leave it and promises a yearly fee of a buck 
in summer and a doe in winter, once it were done. " Many noble and 
divers gentle men of this realm came and demanded many and 
often times wherefore I have not made and imprinted the noble 
histoiy of the ^ San Graal.'" We see his visitors discussing with the 
sagacious printer the historic existence of Arthur. Duchess Margaret 
of Somerset lends him her " Blanchadine and Eglantine ; " the 
Archdeacon of Colchester brings him his translation of the work 
called '^ Cato ; " a mercer of London presses him to undertake the 
'• Royal Book " of Philip le Bel. The Queen's brother, Earl Rivers^ 
chats with him over his own translation of the " Sayings of the 
Philosophers." Even kings showed their interest in his work ; his 
" Tully " was printed under the patronage of Edward the Fourth, his 
" Order of Chivalry " dedicated to Richard the Third, his " Facts of 
Arms" pubHshed at the desire of Henry the Seventh. The Royal Houses 
of York and Lancaster, in fact, rivalled each other in their patronage 
of such literature as they could find. The fashion of large and 
gorgeous libraries had passed from the French to the English princes 
of the time : Henry the Sixth had a valuable collection of books ; that 
of the Louvre was seized by Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, and 
formed the basis of the fine library which he presented to the 
University of Oxford. The great nobles took a far more active and 
personal part in the literary revival. The warrior, Sir John Fastolf, 
was a well-known lover of books. Earl Rivers was himself one of 
the authors of the day ; he found leisure in the interv^als of pilgrimages 
and politics to translate the " Sayings of the Philosophers " and a 
couple of religious tracts for Caxton's press. A friend of far greater in- 
tellectual distinction, however, than these was found in John Tiptoft 
Earl of Worcester. He had wandered during the reign of Henry the 
Sixth in search of learning to Italy, had studied at her universities, 
and become a teacher at Padua, where the elegance of his Latinity 
drew tears from one of the most learned of the Popes, Pius the 
Second, better known as ^Eneas Sylvius. Caxton can find no words 
warm enough to express his admiration of one ^^ which in his time 
flowered in virtue and cunning, to whom I know none like among^ 
the lords of the temporahty in science and moral virtue." But the 
ruthlessness of the Renascence appeared in Tiptoft side by side with- 
its intellectual vigour, and the fall of one whose cruelty had earned him 
the surname of "the Butcher " even amidst the horrors of the civil wv 



^1 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



293 



was greeted with sorrow by none but the faithful printer. " What 
great loss was it," he says in a preface long after his fall, " of that 
noble, virtuous, and well-disposed lord ; when I remember and ad- 
vertise his life, his science, and his virtue, me thinketh (God not dis- 
pleased) over great a loss of such a man, considering his estate and 
cunning." 

Among the group who encouraged the press of Caxton we have 
already seen the figure of the King's young brother, Richard, Duke 
of Gloucester. Able and ruthless as Edward himself, the Duke had 
watched keenly the increase of public discontent as his brother's 
policy developed itself, and had founded on it a scheme of daring ambi- 
tion. On the King's death Richard hastened to secure the person 
of his Royal nephew, Edward the Fifth, to hurry the Queen's family to 
execution, and to receive from the hands of Parliament the office of 
Protector of the realm. As yet he had acted in strict union with the 
Royal Council, but hardly a month had passed, when suddenly entering 
■the Council chamber, he charged Lord Hastings, the favourite minister 
of the late King, who still presided over its meetings, with sorcery and 
■designs upon his life. As he dashed his hand upon the table the room 
was filled with soldiers. " I will not dine," said the Duke, addressing 
Hastings, " till they have brought me your head ; " and the power- 
ful minister was hurried to instant execution in the court-yard or 
the Tower. His colleagues were thrown into prison, and every 
check on the Duke's designs was removed. Edward's marriage had 
always been unpopular, and Richard ventured, on the plea of a 
pre-contract on his brother's part, to declare it invalid and its issue 
illegitimate. Only one step remained to be taken, and a month after 
his brother's death the Duke listened with a show of reluctance to 
the prayer of the Parliament, and consented to accept the crown. 
Daring, however, as was his natural temper, it was not to mere violence 
that he trusted in this seizure of the throne. The personal popularity 
of Edward had hardly restrained the indignation with which the nation 
felt the gradual approach of tyranny throughout his reign ; and it was 
as the restorer of its older liberties that Richard appealed for popular 
support. " We be determined," said the citizens of London in a 
petition to the new monarch, '' rather to adventure and to commit us 
to the peril of our lives and jeopardy of death, than to live in such 
thraldom and bondage as we have lived long time heretofore, oppressed 
and injured by extortions and new impositions against the laws of 
God and man and the liberty and laws of this realm, wherein every 
Englishman is inherited." The new King met the appeal by again 
•convoking Parliament, which, as we have seen, had been all but 
■discontinued under Edward, and by sweeping measures of reform. 
In the one session of his brief reign he declared the practice of ex- 
torting money by " benevolencCi " illegal, while numerous grants of 



The New 

Monarchy 

14.71- 

1509. 



Richard 
the Third 



294 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



pardons and remission of forfeitures reversed in some measure the 
policy of terror by which Edward at once held the country in awe 
and filled his treasury. The energy of the new government was seen 
in the numerous statutes which broke the slumbers of Parliamentary 
legislation. A series of mercantile enactments strove to protect the 
growing interests of English commerce. The King's interest in litera- 
ture showed itself in the provision that no statutes should act as 3 
hindrance '^ to any artificer or merchant stranger, of what nation or 
country he be, for bringing unto this realm or selling by retail or other- 
wise of any manner of books, written or imprinted.^' His prohibition 
of the iniquitous seizure of goods before conviction of felony, which 
had prevailed during Edward's reign, his liberation of the bondmen 
who still remained unenfranchised on the Royal domain, and his 
religious foundations, show Richard's keen anxiety to purchase a popu- 
larity in which the bloody opening of his reign might be forgotten. 
But the gratitude which he had earned by his restoration of the older 
liberty was swept av/ay in the universal horror at a new deed of blood. 
His young nephews, Edward the Fifth and his brother, the Duke of 
York, had been flung at his accession into the Tower ; and the sudden 
disappearance of the two boys, murdered, as it was alleged, by their 
uncle's order, united the whole nation against him. Morton, the 
exiled Bishop of Ely, took advantage of the general hatred and of the 
common hostility of both Yorkists and Lancastrians to the Royal 
murderer to link both parties in a wide conspiracy. Of the line of 
John of Gaunt no lawful issue remained, but the House of Somerset 
had sprung, as we have seen, from his union with his mistress 
Catherine Swynford, and the last representative of this line, the 
Lady Margaret Beaufort, had married Edmund Tudor and become 
the mother of Henry, Earl of Richmond. In the bill which in other 
respects legitimated the Beauforts the right of succession to the 
throne had been expressly reserved, but as the last remaining scion of 
the line of Lancaster Henry's claim to it was acknowledged by the 
partizans of his House, and he had been driven to seek a refuge in 
Brittany from the jealous hostility of the Yorkist sovereigns. Morton^ 
who had joined him in his exile, induced him to take advantage 
of the horror with which Richard was regarded even by the Yorkists 
themselves, and to unite both parties in his favour by a promise of 
marriage with Margaret, the eldest daughter of Edward the Fourthe 
The result of this masterly policy was seen as soon as the Earl 
landed, in spite of Richard's vigilance, at Milford Haven, and ad- 
vanced through Wales. He no sooner encountered the Royal army 
at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire than treachery decided the 
day. Abandoned ere the battle began by a division of his forces 
under Lord Stanley, and as it opened by a second body under the 
Earl of Northumberland, Richard dashed^ with a cry of " Treason, 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



295 



Treason/' into the thick of the fight. In the fury of his despair he had 
already flung the Lancastrian standard to the ground and hewed his 
way into the very presence of his rival, when he fell overpowered by 
numbers, and the crown which he had worn, and which was found as 
^e struggle ended lying near a hawthorn bush, was placed on the 
iiead of the conqueror. 

With the accession of Henry the Seventh ended the long bloodshed 
of the civil wars. The two warring lines were united by his marriage 
with Elizabeth : his only dangerous rivals were removed by the 
successive executions of the nephews of Edward the Fourth, the Earl 
of Warwick (a son of Edward's brother the Duke of Clarence) and 
John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln (a son of Edward's sister) who had 
been acknowledged as his successor by Richard the Third. Two 
remarkable impostors succeeded for a time in exciting formidable 
revolts, Lambert Simnel, the son of a joiner at Oxford, under the name 
of the Earl of Warwick, and Perkin Warbeck, a native of Tournay, 
who personated the Duke of York, the second of the children mur- 
dered in the Tower. Defeat, however, reduced the first to the post 
of scullion in the Royal kitchen ; and the second, after far stranger 
adventures, and the recognition of his claims by the Kings of Scotland 
and France, as well as by the Duchess-Dowager of Burgundy, whom 
he claimed as his aunt, was captured and brought to the block. 
Revolt only proved more clearly the strength which had been given 
to the New Monarchy by the revolution which had taken place in 
the art of war. The introduction of gunpowder had ruined feudal- 
ism. The mounted and heavily-armed knight gave way to the meaner 
footman. Fortresses which had been impregnable against the attacks 
of the Middle Ages crumbled before the new artillery. Although gun- 
powder had been in use as early as Cressy it was not till the accession 
of the House of Lancaster that it was really brought into effective em- 
ployment as a military resource. But the revolution in warfare was 
immediate. The wars of Henry the Fifth were wars of sieges. The 
"Last of the Barons," as Warwick has picturesquely been styled, relied 
mainly on his train of artillery. Artillery gave Henry the Seventh 
his easy victory over a rising of the Cornish insurgents, the most for- 
midable danger which threatened his throne. The strength which the 
change gave to the Crown was, in fact, almost irresistible. Throughout 
the Middle Ages the call of a great baron had been enough to raise a 
formidable revolt. Yeomen and retainers took down the bow from 
their chimney corner, knights buckled on their armour, and in a few 
days an army threatened the throne. But without artillery such an 
army was now helpless, and the one train of artillery in the kingdom 
lay at the disposal of the King. It was the consciousness of his 
strength which enabled the new sovereign to quietly resume the policy 
of Edward the Fourth. He was forced, indeed, by the circumstances 



The New 

monarghy. 

1471- 

l^SOd. 



296 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of his descent to base his right to the throne on a purely Parliamentary 
title. Without reference either to the claim of blood or conquest, the 
Houses enacted simply " that the inheritance of the Crown should be, 
rest, remain, and abide in the most Royal person of their sovereign 
lord, King Henry the Seventh, and the heirs of his body lawfully 
ensuing." But the policy of Edward was faithfully followed, and 
Parliament was only once convened during the last thirteen years of 
Henry's reign. The chief aim, indeed, of the King appeared to be 
the accumulation of a treasure which should relieve him from the 
need of appealing for its aid. Subsidies granted for the support of 
a war with France, which Henry evaded, were carefully hoarded by 
his grasping economy, and swelled by the revival of dormant claims 
of the crown, by the exaction of fines for the breach of forgotten 
tenures, and by a host of petty extortions. The discontinuance of 
Parliament was followed by the revival of Benevolences. A dilemma 
of his favourite minister, which received the name of " Morton's fork," 
extorted gifts to the exchequer from men who lived handsomely on 
the ground that their wealth was manifest, and from those who lived 
plainly on the plea that economy had made them Vv^ealthy. So suc- 
cessful were these efforts that at the end of his reign Henry bequeathed 
a hoard of two millions to his successor. The same imitation ol 
Edward's policy was seen in Henry's civil government. Broken as was 
the strength of the baronage, there still remained lords whom the 
new monarch watched with a jealous solicitude. Their power lay in 
the hosts of disorderly retainers who swarmed round their houses, 
ready to furnish a force in case of revolt, while in peace they became 
centres of outrage and defiance to the law. Edward had ordered the 
dissolution of these military households in his Statute of Liveries, and 
the statute was enforced by Henry with the utmost severity. On 
a visit to the Earl of Oxford, one of the most devoted adherents of 
the Lancastrian cause, the King found two long lines of liveried 
retainers drawn up to receive him. " I thank you for your good cheer, 
my Lord," said Henry as they parted, " but I may not endure to have 
my laws broken in my sight. My attorney must speak with you." 
The Earl was glad to escape with a fine of ;i^ 10,000. It was with a 
special view to the suppression of this danger that Henry revived the 
criminal jurisdiction of the Royal Council, which had almost fallen 
into oesuetude, and whose immense development at a later time 
furnished his son with his readiest instrument of tyranny. A yet 
more dangerous innovation, the law which enabled justices of assize 
or of the peace to try all cases save those of treason and felony 
without a jury, may have been a merely temporary measure for the 
rodress of disorder, and was repealed at the opening of the next reign, 
But steady as was the drift of Henry's policy in the direction of 
despotism, we see no traces of the originality or genius with which 



I 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



297 



the fancy of later historians has invested him. His temper, silent, 
'calous, but essentially commonplace, was content to follow out, tamely 
and patiently, the plans of Edward, without anticipating the more 
terrible policy of Wolsey or of Cromwell. Wrapt in schemes of foreign 
intrigue, to wliich we shall afterwards refer, he looked with dread and 
suspicion on the one movement which broke the apathy of his reign, 
the great intellectual revolution which bears the name of the Revival 
of Letters. 

Section IV.— Tbe New Learning. 1509—1520. 

[Authorities. — The general literary history of this period is fully and ac- 
curately given by Mr. Hallam (** Literature of Europe"), and in a confused 
but interesting way by Warton (** History of English Poetiy"). The best 
and most accessible edition in England of the typical book of the Revival, 
More's " Utopia," is that published and edited by Mr. Arber (** English Re- 
prints," 1869). The history of Erasmus in England may be followed in his 
own entertaining Letters, abstracts of some of which will be found in the 
well-known biography by Jortin. Colet's work and the theological aspect of 
tlie Revival has been admirably described by Mr. Seebohm (*'The Oxford 
Reformers of 1498 ") ; for Warham's share, I have ventured to borrow a little 
from a paper of mine on *' Lambeth and the Archbishops," in Maanillan^s 
Magazine.'^ 



While England cov/ered before the horrors of civil war, or slumbered 
beneath the apathetic rule of Henry the Seventh, the world around her 
was passing through changes more momentous than any it had wit- 
nessed since the victory of Christianity and the fall of the Roman 
Empire. Its physical bounds were suddenly enlarged. The dis- 
coveries of Copernicus revealed to man the secret of the universe. 
The daring of the Portuguese mariners doubled the Cape of Good 
Hope and anchored their merchant fleets in the harbours of India. 
Columbus crossed the untraversed ocean to add a New World to the 
Old. Sebastian Cabot, starting from the port of Bristol, threaded his 
way among the icebergs of Labrador. This sudden contact with new 
lands, new faiths, new races of men quickened the slumbering intelli- 
gence of Europe into a strange curiosity. The first book of voyages 
that told of the Western World, the travels of Amerigo Vespucci, were, 
at the time of More's Utopia, " in every body's hands." The Utopia 
Itself, in its wide range of speculation on every subject of human 
thought and action, tells us how roughly and utterly the narrowness 
and limitation of the Middle Ages had been broken up. The capture 
£)f Constantinople by the Turks, and the flight of its Greek scholars to 
the shores of Italy, opened anew the science and literature of the older 
world at the very hour when the intellectual energy of the Middle 
Ages had sunk into exhaustion. Not a single book of any real value, 
'Save those of Sir John Fortescue and Philippe de Commines,was pro- 



298 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



duced north of the Alps during the fifteenth century. In England, 
as we have seen, literature had reached its lowest ebb. It was at this 
moment that the exiled Greek scholars were welcomed in Italy, and 
that Florence, so long the home of freedom and of art, became the 
home of an intellectual Revival. The poetry of Homer, the drama of 
Sophocles, the philosophy of Aristotle and of Plato woke again to life 
beneath the shadow of the mighty dome with which Brunelleschi had 
just crowned the City by the Arno. All the restless energy which 
Florence had so long thrown into the cause of liberty she flung, now 
that her liberty was reft from her, into the cause of letters. The 
galleys of her merchants brought back manuscripts from the East 
as -the most precious portion of their freight. In the palaces of her 
nobles fragments of classic sculpture ranged themselves beneath the 
frescoes of Ghirlandajo. The recovery of^ a treatise of Cicero or 
a tract of Sallust from the dust of a monastic library was welcomed 
by the group of statesmen and artists who gathered in the Rucellai 
gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm. Crowds of foreign scholars soon 
flocked over the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the new knowledge, 
from the Florentine teachers. Grocyn, a fellow of New College, was 
perhaps the first Englishman who studied under the Greek exile, 
Chalcondylas, and the Greek lectures which he delivered in Oxford on 
his return mark the opening of a new period in our history. Physical, 
as well as literary, activity awoke with the re-discovery of the teachers 
of Greece, and the continuous progress of English science may be 
datea from the day when Linacre, another Oxford student, returned 
from the lectures of the Florentine Politian to revive the older tradi- 
tion of medicine by his translation of Galen. The awakening of a 
rational Christianity, whether in England or in the Teutonic world 
at large, begins with the Florentine studies of John Colet. 

From the first it was manifest that the revival of letters would take 
a tone in England very different from the tone it had taken in Italy, a 
tone less literary, less largely human, but more moral, more religious, 
more practical in its bearings both upon society and politics. The 
vigour and earnestness of Colet were the best proof of the strength 
with which the new movement was to affect English religion. He 
came back from Florence to Oxford utterly untouched by the Platonic 
mysticism or the semi-serious infidelity which characterized the group 
of scholars round Lorenzo the Magnificent. He was hardly more 
influenced by their literary enthusiasm. The knowledge of Greek 
seems to have had one almost exclusive end for him, and this was s 
religious end. Greek was the key by which he could unlock the 
Gospels and the New Testament, and in these he thought that he 
could find a new religious standing-ground. It was this resolve of 
Colet to fling aside the traditional dogmas of his day and to discover 
a rational and practical religion in the Gospels themselves, which 



A 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



299 



gave its peculiar stamp to the theology of the Renascence. His faith 
stood simply on a vivid realization of the person of Christ. In the 
prominence which such a view gave to the moral life, in his free 
criticism of the earlier Scriptures, in his tendency to simple forms of 
doctrine and confessions of faith, Colet struck the key-note of a mode 
of religious thought as strongly in contrast with that of the later 
Reformation as with that of Catholicism itself. The allegorical and 
mystical theology on which the Middle Ages had spent their intel- 
lectual vigour to such little purpose fell at one blow before his rejection 
of all but the historical and grammatical sense of the Biblical text. 
The great fabric of belief built up by the mediaeval doctors seemed to 
him simply "the corruptions of the Schoolmen." In the Life ancj 
Sayings of its Founder he found a simple and rational Christianity, 
whose fittest expression was the Apostles' creed. "About the rest," 
he said with characteristic impatience, "let divines dispute as they 
will." Of his attitude towards the coarser aspects of the current 
religion his behaviour at a later time before the famous shrine of St. 
Thomas at Canterbury gives us a rough indication. As the blaze of 
its jewels, its costly sculptures, its elaborate metal-work burst on 
Colet's view, he suggested with bitter irony that a saint so lavish to the 
poor in his lifetime would certainly prefer that they should possess the 
Avealth heaped round him since his death, and rejected with petulant 
disgust the rags of the martyr which were offered for his adoration, 
and the shoe which was offered for his kiss. The earnestness, the 
religious zeal, the very impatience and want of sympathy with the 
past which we see in every word and act of the man, burst out in the 
lectures on St. Paul's Epistles which he delivered at Oxford. Even to 
the most critical among his hearers he seemed "like one inspired, 
raised in voice, eye, his whole countenance and mien, out of himself." 
Severe as was the outer life of the new teacher, a severity marked by 
his plain black robe and the frugal table which he preserved amidst 
his later dignities, his lively conversation, his frank simplicity, the 
purity and nobleness of his life, even the keen outbursts of his trouble- 
some temper, endeared him to a group of scholars among whom 
Erasmus and Thomas More stood in the foremost rank. 

" Greece has crossed the Alps," cried the exiled Argyi-opulos on 
hearing a translation of Thucydides by the German Reuchlin ; but 
the glory, whether of Reuchlin or of the Teutonic scholars who fol- 
lowed him, was soon eclipsed by that of Erasmus. His enormous in- 
dustry, the vast store of classical learning which he gradually accu- 
mulated, Erasmus shared with others of his day. In patristic reading 
he may have stood beneath Luther ; in originality and profoundness of 
thought he was certainly inferior to More. His theology, though he 
made a far greater mark on the world by it than even by his scholar- 
ship, we have seen that he derived almost without change from Colet. 



300 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



But his combination of vast learning with keen observation, of acute- 
ness of remark with a lively fancy, of genial wit with a perfect good 
sense — his union of as sincere a piety and as profound a zeal for 
rational religion as Colet's with a dispassionate fairness towards older 
faiths, a large love of secular culture, and a genial freedom and play 
of mind — this union was his own, and it was through this that Eras- 
mus embodied for the Teutonic peoples the quickening influence of 
the New Learning during the long scholar-life which began at Paris 
and ended amidst darkness and sorrow at Basle. At the time of 
Colet's return from Italy Erasmus was young and comparatively un- 
known, but the chivalrous enthusiasm of the new movement breaks 
out in his letters from Paris, whither he had wandered as a scholar. 
" I have given up my whole soul to Greek learning,'' he writes, " and 
as soon as I get any money I shall buy Greek books — and then I shall 
buy some clothes." It was in despair of reaching Italy that the 
young scholar made his way to Oxford, as the one place on this side 
the Alps where he would be enabled through the teaching of Grocyn 
to acquire a knowledge of Greek. But he had no sooner arrived there 
than all feeling of regret vanished away. "I have found in Oxford," he 
writes, "so much polish and learning that now I hardly care about going 
to Italy at all, save for the sake of having been there. When I listen 
to my friend Colet it seems like listening to Plato himself. Who does 
not wonder at the wide range of Grocyn's knowledge ? What can be 
more searching, deep, and refined than the judgment of Linacre t When 
did Nature mould a temper more gentle, endearing, and happy than 
the temper of Thomas More?" But the new movement was already 
spreading beyond the bounds of Oxford. If, like ever}-- other living 
impulse, it shrank from the cold suspicion of the King, it found shelter 
'under the patronage of his minister. Immersed as Archbishop 
Warham was in the business of the State, he was no mere politician. 
The eulogies which Erasmus lavished on him while he lived, bis 
praises of the Primate's learning, of his ability in business, his pleasant 
humour, his modesty, his fidelity to friends, may pass for what eulogies 
of living men are commonly worth. But it is difficult to doubt the 
sincerity of the glowing picture which he drew of him when death 
had destroyed all interest in mere adulation. The letters indeed 
which passed between the great Churchman and the wandering scholar, 
the quiet, simple-hearted grace which amidst constant instances of 
munificence preserved the perfect equality of literary friendship, the 
enlightened piety to which Erasmus could address the noble words of 
his preface to St. Jerome, confirm the judgment of every good man 
of Warham's day. In the simplicity of his Hfe the Archbishop offered 
a striking contrast to the greater prelates of his time. He cared 
nothing for the pomp, the sensual pleasures, the hunting and dicing in 
which they too commonly indulged. An hour's pleasant reading, a 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



SC*! 



quiet chat with some learned new-comer, alone broke the endless 
round of civil and ecclesiastical business. Few men realized so 
thoroughly as Warham the new conception of an intellectual and 
moral equality before which the old social distinctions of the world 
were to vanish away. His favourite relaxation was to sup among a 
group of scholarly visitors, enjoying their fun and retorting with fun of 
his own. But the scholar-world found more than supper or fun at the 
Primate's board. His purse was ever open to relieve their poverty. 
" Had I found such a patron in my youth," Erasmus wrote long after, 
" I too might have been counted among the fortunate ones." It was 
with Grocyn that Erasmus rowed up the river to Warham's board at 
Lambeth, and in spite of an unpromising beginning the acquaintance 
turned out wonderfully well. The Primate loved him, Erasmus wrote 
home, as if he were his father or his brother, and his generosity 
surpassed that of all his friends. He offered him a sinecure, and 
when he declined it he bestowed on him a pension of a hundred 
crowns a year. When Erasmus wandered to Paris it was Warham's 
invitation which recalled him to. England. When the rest of his 
patrons left him to starve on the sour beer of Cambridge it was War- 
ham who sent him fifty angels. " I wish they were thirty legions of 
them," the old man puns in his good-humoured way. 

The hopes of the little group of scholars were held in check during 
the life of Henry the Seventh by his suspicion and ill will, but a " New 
Order," to use their own enthusiastic term, dawned on them with 
the accession of his son. Henry the Eighth had hardly completed 
his eighteenth year when he mounted the throne, but the beauty of 
his person, his vigour and skill in arms, seemed only matched by the 
generosity of his temper and the nobleness of his political aims. 
The abuses of the previous reign, the extortion of the Royal treasury, 
were at once remedied. Empson and Dudley, the ministers of 
his father's tyranny, were brought to the block, and the rights of the 
subject protected by a limitation of the time within which actions 
for recovery of its rights might be brought by the Crown. No acces- 
sion ever excited higher expectations among a people than that of 
Henry the Eighth. Pole, his bitterest enemy, confessed at a later 
time, that the King was of a temper at the beginning of his reign 
'* from which all excellent things might have been hoped." His sym- 
pathies were from the first openly on the side of the New Learning ; 
for Henry was not only himself a fair scholar, but even in boyhood 
had roused by his wit and attainments the wonder of Erasmus. 
The great scholar hurried back to England to pour out his exultation 
in the " Praise of Folly," his song of triumph over the old world of 
ignorance and bigotry which was to vanish away before the light and 
knowledge of the new reign. Folly, in his amusing little book, 
mounts a pulpit in cap and bells and pelts with her satire the [ 



302 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



absurdities of the world around her, the superstition of the monk, 
the pedantry of the grammarian, the dogmatism of the doctors of 
the schools, the cruelty of the sportsman. Gaily as it reads, the 
book was written in More's house to while away hours of sickness. 
The irony of Erasmus was backed by the earnestness of Colet. 
Four years before he had been called from Oxford to the Deanery of 
St. Paul's, and he now became the great preacher of his day, the 
predecessor of Latimer in his simplicity, his directness, and his force. 
But for the success of the new reform, a reform which could only be 
wrought out by the tranquil spread of knowledge and the gradual en- 
lightenment of the human conscience, the one thing needful was peace ; 
and the young King to whom the scholar-group looked was already 
longing for war. Long as peace had been established between the 
two countries, the designs of England upon the French crown had 
never been really abandoned. Edward the Fourth and Henry the 
Seventh had each threatened France with invasion, and only with- 
drawn on a humiliating payment of large sums by Lewis the Eleventh. 
But the policy of Lewis, his extinction of the great feudatories, and 
the administrative centralization which he was the first to introduce, 
raised his kingdom ere the close of his reign to a height far above that 
of its European rivals. The power of France, in fact, was only counter- 
balanced by that of Spain, which had become a great state through 
the union of Castile and Arragon, and where the prudence of Ferdi- 
nand was suddenly backed by the stroke of good fortune which added 
the New World to the dominion of Castile. Too weak to meet 
France single-handed, Henry the Seventh saw in an alliance with 
Spain, not merely a security against his ^ hereditary enemy,' but an ad- 
mirable starting point in case of any English attempt for the recovery 
of Guienne, and this alliance had been cemented by the marriage of 
his eldest son, Arthur, with Ferdinand's daughter, Catherine of Arragon. 
The match was broken by the death of the young bridegroom ; but 
Henry the Eighth clung to his father's policy, and a Papal dispen- 
sation enabled Catherine to wed the brother of her late husband, 
the young sovereign himself. Throughout the first years of his 
reign, amidst the tournaments and revelry which seemed to absorb 
his whole energies, Henry was in fact keenly watching the opening 
which the ambition of France began to afford for a renewal of the old 
struggle. Under the successors of Lewis the Eleventh the efforts of 
the French monarchy had been directed to the conquest of Italy. 
Charles the Eighth, after entering Milan and Naples in triumph, had 
been driven back over the Alps, but Lewis the Twelfth had succeeded 
in establishing himself in Lombardy. A league of the Italian States 
was at last formed for his expulsion, with the Pope at its head, and to 
this league Spain and England gave their joint support. Of all the \ 
confederates, however, Heniy alone reaped no profit from the war. \ 



I.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



303 



^'The barbarians," to use the phrase of Juhus the Second, "were 
chased beyond the Alps;" but Ferdinand's unscrupulous adroitness 
only used the English force, which had landed at Fontarabia with the 
view of recovering Guienne, to cover his own conquest of Navarre. 
The shame of this fruitless campaign roused in Henry a fiercer 
spirit of aggression ; he landed in person in the north of France, and 
a sudden rout of the French cavalry in an engagement near Guinegate, 
which received from its bloodless character the name of the Battle of 
the Spurs, gave him the fortresses of Terouenne and Tournay. The 
'S'oung conqueror was eagerly pressing on from this new base of action 
to the recovery* of his " heritage of France," when he found himself 
suddenly left alone by the desertion of Ferdinand and the dissolution 
of the league. The millions left by his father were exhausted, his 
subjects had been drained by repeated subsidies, and, furious as he 
was at the treachery of his allies, Henry was driven to conclude an 
inglorious peace. 

To the hopes of the New Learning this sudden outbreak of the 
spirit of war, this change of the monarch from whom they had looked 
for a " new order " into a vulgar conqueror, proved a bitter disappoint- 
ment. Colet thundered from the pulpit of St.PauFs, that "an unjust 
peace is better than the justest war," and protested that " when men 
out of hatred and ambition fight with and destroy one another, they 
fight under the banner, not of Christ, but of the Devil." Erasmus 
quitted Cambridge with a bitter satire against the " madness " around 
him. " It is the people," he said, in words which must have startled 
his age, — "it is the people who build cities, while the madness of 
princes destroys them." The sovereigns of his time appeared to 
him like ravenous birds poimcing with beak and claw on the hard- 
won w^ealth and knowledge of mankind. "Kings who are scarcely 
men,'^ he exclaimed in bitter irony, " are called ^ divine ; ' they are 
^ invincible ' though they fly from every battle-field ; ^ serene ' though 
they turn the world upside down in a storm of war ; ^ illustrious 
though they grovel in ignorance of all that is noble ; ^ Catholic 
though they follow anything rather than Christ. Of all birds the 
Eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty, a bird neither 
beautiful, nor musical, nor good for food, but murderous, greedy, 
hateful to all, the curse of all, and with its great powers of doing harm 
only surpassed by its desire to do it." It was the first time in 
modern history that religion had foimally dissociated itself from the 
ambition of princes and the horrors of war, or that the new spirit of 
criticism had ventured not only to question but to deny what had till 
then seemed the primary truths of political order. We shall soon see 
to what further length the new speculations were pushed by a greater 
thinker, but for the moment the indignation of the New Learning was 
diverted to more practical ends by the sudden peace. The silent 



Sec. IV. 

The New 

Learning. 

1509- 

1520. 

15x3. 



The 

Peace 

and the 

New 

Learning. 



304 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



influences of time were working, indeed, steadily for its cause. The 
printing press was making letters the common property of all. In the 
last thirty years of the fifteenth century ten thousand editions of books 
and pamphlets are said to have been published throughout Europe, 
the most important half of them of course in Italy ; and all the Latin 
authors were accessible to every student before it closed. Almost 
all the more valuable authors of Greece were published in the first 
twenty years of the century which followed. At the moment, there- 
fore, of the Peace the profound influence of this burst of the two 
great classic literatures upon the world was just making, itself felt. 
"For the first time," to use the picturesque phrase of M. Taine, " men 
opened their eyes and saw." The human mind seemed to. gather new 
energies at the sight of the vast field which opened before it. It 
attacked every province of knowledge, and in a few years. it trans- 
formed all. Experimental science, the science of philology, the science 
of politics, the critical investigation of religious truth, all took their 
origin from this Renascence — this ^ New Birth ' of the world. Art, if 
it lost much in purity and propriety, gained in scope and in the fear- 
lessness of its love of Nature. Literature, if crushed for the moment 
by the overpowering attraction of the great models of Greece and 
Rome, revived with a grandeur of form, a large spirit of humanity, 
such as it had never known since their day. In England, the influence 
of the new movement extended faf beyond the little group in which it 
had a few years before seemed concentrated. The great Churchmen 
still remained its patrons. Langton, Bishop of Worcester, took delight 
in examining the young scholars of his episcopal family every evening, 
and sent all the most promising of them to study across the Alps. 
Archbishop Warham, in a similar spirit, sent Croke for education to 
Leipsic and Louvain. Cuthbert Tunstall, and Hugh Latimer, men 
destined to strangely different fortunes, went to study together at Padua. 
Henry himself, bitterly as he had disappointed its hopes, remained the 
steady friend of the New Learning. Through all the strange changes of 
his terrible career the King^s Court was the home of letters. Even as a 
boy his son, Edward the Sixth, was a fair scholar in both the classical 
languages. His daughter Mary wrote good Latin letters. Elizabeth, 
who spoke French and Italian as fluently as English, began every day 
with an hour's reading in the Greek Testament, the tragedies of 
Sophocles, or the orations of Isocrates and Demosthenes. Widely as 
Henry's ministers differed from one another, they all agreed in sharing 
and protecting the culture around them. 

The war therefore was hardly over, when the New Learning entered 
on its work of reform with an energy which contrasted strangely with 
its recent tone of despair. The election of Leo the Tenth, the fellow- 
student of Linacre, the friend of Erasmus, seemed to <Tive it ' i con- 
trol of Christendom. The age of the turbulent, anihUHvus jiuvjs was 



VL] 



7'HE NEW MONARCHY, 



305 



thought to be over, and the new Pope declared formally for a 
universal peace. "Leo," wrote an English agent at his Court, in 
words to which after-history lent a strange meaning, " would favour 
literature and the arts, busy himself in building, and enter into no war 
save through actual compulsion." England, under the new ministry 
of Wolsey, withdrew from any active interference in the stmggles of 
the Continent, and seemed as resolute as Leo himself for peace. 
Colet seized the opportunity to commence the work of educational 
reform by the foundation of his own Grammar School, beside St. 
Paul's. The bent of its founder's mind was shown by the image of 
the Child Jesus which stood over its gate, with the words " Hear ye 
Him " graven beneath it. " Lift up your little white hands for me," 
wrote the Dean to his scholars, in words which show the tenderness 
that lay beneath, the stern outer seeming of the man, — " for me which 
prayeth for you to God." All the educational designs of the reformers 
were carried out in the new foundation. The old methods of instruc- 
tion were superseded by fresh grammars composed by Erasmus and 
other scholars for its use. Lilly, an Oxford student who had studied 
Greek in the East, was placed at its head. The injunctions of the 
< founder aimed at the union of rational rehgion with sound learning, at 
^ the exclusion of the scholastic logic, and at the steady diffusion of the 
, two classical literatures. The more bigoted of the clergy were quick 
to take alarm. "No wonder," More wrote to the Dean, " your school 
raises a storm, for it is like the wooden horse in which armed Greeks 
were hidden for the ruin of barbarous Troy." But the cry of alarm 
passed helplessly away. Not only did the study of Greek creep 
gradually into the schools which existed, but the example of Colet 
was followed by a crowd of imitators. More grammar schools, it 
has been said, were founded in the latter years of Henry than in the 
three centuries before. The impulse grew happily stronger as the 
direct influence of the New Learning passed away. The grammar 
schools of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, in a word the system 
of middle-class education which by the close of the century had 
changed the very face of England, were the direct results of Colet's 
foundation of St. PauPs. But the "armed Greeks" of Morels apologue 
found a yet wider field in the reform of the higher education of the 
country. On the Universities the influence of the New Learning was 
like a passing from death to life. Erasmus gives us a picture of what 
happened at Cambridge, where he was himself for a time a teacher of 
Greek. " Scarcely thirty years ago nothing was taught here but the 
Parva Logicalia of Alexander, antiquated exercises from Aristotle, 
and the QucBstiofies of Scotus. As time went on better studies were 
added, mathematics, a new, or at any rate a renovated, Aristotle, and 
a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been the result .^ The 
University is now so flourishing that it can compete with the best 

X 



3o6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



universities of the age." Latimer and Croke returned from Italy 
and carried on the work of Erasmus at Cambridge, where Fisher, 
Bishop of Rochester, himself one of the foremost scholars of the new 
movement, lent it his powerful support. At Oxford the Revival met 
with a fiercer opposition. The contest took the form of boyish frays, 
in which the young partisans and opponents of the New Learning 
took sides as Greeks and Trojans. The King himself had to summon 
one of its fiercest enemies to Woodstock, and to impose silence on 
the tirades which were delivered from the University pulpit. The 
preacher alleged that he was carried away by the Spirit. " Yes," 
retorted the King, " by the spirit, not of wisdom, but of folly." But 
even at Oxford the contest was soon at an end. Fox, Bishop of 
Winchester, established the first Greek lecture there in his new 
college of Corpus Christi, and a Professorship of Greek was at a 
later time established by the Crown. "The students," wrote an eye- 
witness, "rush to Greek letters, they endure watching, fasting, toil, and 
hunger in the pursuit of them." The work was crowned at last by 
the munificent foundation of Cardinal College, to share in whose 
teaching Wolsey invited the most eminent of the living scholars of 
Europe, and for whose library he promised to obtain copies of all the 
manuscripts in the Vatican. 

As Colet had been the first to attempt the reform of English edu- 
cation, so he was the first to imdertake the reform of the Church. 
Warham still flung around the movement his steady protection, 
and it was by his commission that Colet was enabled to address 
the Convocation of the Clergy in words which set before them 
with imsparing severity the religious ideal of the New Learning. 
Would that for once," burst forth the fiery preacher, " you would 
remember your name and profession and take thought for the refor- 
mation of the Church ! Never was it more necessary, and never did 
the state of the Church need more vigorous endeavours." " We are 
troubled with heretics," he vv^ent on, " but no heresy of theirs is so 
fatal to us and to the people at large as the vicious and depraved 
lives of the clergy. That is the worst heresy of all." It was the 
reform of the bishops that must precede that of the clergy, the reform 
of the clergy that would lead to a general revival of religion in the 
people at large. The accumulation of benefices, the luxury and 
worldliness of the priesthood, must be abandoned. The prelates ought 
to be busy preachers, to forsake the Court and labour in their own 
dioceses. Care should be taken for the ordination and promotion oi 
worthier ministers, residence should be enforced, the low standard or 
clerical morality should be raised. It is plain that Colet looked for ^ 
ward, not to a reform of doctrine, but to a reform of life, not to a 
revolution which should sweep away the older superstitions which he 
despised, but to a regeneration of spiritual feeling before which they 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



307 



would inevitably vanish. He was at once charged, however, with 
heresy, but Warham repelled the charge with disdain. Henry himself, 
to whom Colet had been denounced, bade him go boldly on. " Let 
every man have his own doctor,'' said the young King, after a long in- 
terview, " and let every man favour his own, but this man is the doctor 
for me." Still more marked than Warham's protection of Colet was 
the patronage which the Primate extended to the efforts of Erasmus. 
His edition of the works of St. Jerome had been begun under 
Warham's encouragement during the great scholar's residence at 
Cambridge, and it appeared with a dedication to the Archbishop 
on its title-page. That Erasmus could find protection in Warham's 
name for a work which boldly recalled Christendom to the path of 
sound Biblical criticism, that he could address him in words so out- 
spoken as those of his preface, shows how fully the Primate sympa- 
thized with the highest efforts of the New Learning. Nowhere had 
the spirit of inquiry so firmly set itself against the claims of authority. 
" Synods and decrees, and even councils," wrote Erasmus, " are by 
no means in my judgment the fittest modes of repressing error, 
unless truth depend simply on authority. But on the contrary, the 
more dogmas there are, the more fruitful is the ground in producing 
heresies. Never was the Christian faith purer or more undefiled than 
when the world was content with a single creed, and that the shortest 
creed we have." It is touching even now to listen to such an appeal 
of reason and of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was 
soon to flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions, and Creeds of 
Pope Pius, and Westminster Catechisms, and Thirty-nine Articles. The 
principles which Erasmus urged in his " Jerome," were urged with far 
greater clearness and force in a work which laid the foundations of the 
future Reformation, the edition of the Greek Testament on which he 
had been engaged at Cambridge, and whose production was almost 
wholly due to the encouragement and assistance he received from 
English scholars. In itself the book was a bold defiance of theological 
tradition. It set aside the Latin version of the Vulgate, which had 
secured universal acceptance in the Church. Its method of intei-preta- 
tion was based, not on received dogmas, but on the literal meaning of 
the text. Its real end was the end at which Colet had aimed in his 
Oxford lectures. Erasmus desired to set Christ himself in the place 
of the Church, to recall men from the teachings of Christian theologians 
to the teachings of the Founder of Christianity. The whole value of 
the Gospels to him lay in the vividness with which they brought home 
to their readers the personal impression of Christ himself. " Were we 
to have seen him with our own eyes, we should not have so intimate 
a knowledge as they give us of Christ, speaking, healing, dying, rising 
again, as it were, in our very presence." All the superstitions of 
mediaeval worship faded away in the hght of this personal worship of 

X 2 



3o8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Thomas 
More. 



Christ. " If the footprints of Christ are shown us in any place, we 
laieel down and adore them. Why do we not rather venerate the living 
and breathing picture of him in these books ? We deck statues of 
wood and stone with gold and gems for the love of Christ. Yet they 
only profess to represent to us the outer form of his body, while these 
books present us with a living picture of his holy mind." In the same 
way the actual teaching of Christ was made to supersede the mysterious 
dogmas of the older ecclesiastical teaching. " As though Christ taught 
such subtleties," burst out Erasmus : " subtleties that can scarcely be 
understood even by a few theologians — or as though the strength of 
the Christian religion consisted in man's ignorance of it ! It may be 
the safer course," he goes on, with characteristic irony, " to conceal the 
state-mysteries of kings, but Christ desired his mysteries to be spread 
abroad as openly as was possible." In the diffusion, in the universal 
knowledge of the teaching of Christ the foundation of a reformed Chris- 
tianity had still, he urged, to be laid. With the tacit approval of the 
Primate of a Church which from the time of Wyclif had held the trans- 
lation and reading of the Bible in the common tongue to be heresy and 
a crime punishable with the fire, Erasmus boldly avows his wish for a 
Bible open and intelligible to all. " I wish that even the weakest woman 
might read the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. I wish that they 
were translated into all languages, so as to be read and understood 
not only by Scots and Irishmen, but even by Saracens and Turks. 
But the first step to their being read is to make them intelligible to 
the reader. I long for the day when the husbandman shall sing 
portions of them to himself as he follows the plough, when the weaver 
shall hum them to the time of his shuttle, when the traveller shall 
while away with their stories the weariness of his journey." The New 
Testament of Erasmus became the topic of the day ; the Court, the 
Universities, every household to which the New Learning had pene- 
trated, read and discussed it. But bold as its language may have 
seemed, Warham not only expressed his approbation, but lent the 
work — as he wrote to its author — "to bishop after bishop." The 
most influential of his suffragans, Bishop Fox of Winchester, declared 
that the mere version was worth ten commentaries : the most learned, 
Fisher of Rochester, entertained Erasmus at his house. 

Daring and full of promise as were these efforts of the New Learning 
in the direction of educational and religious reform, its political and 
social speculations took a far wider range in the " Utopia " of Thomas 
More. Even in the household of Cardinal Morton, where he had 
spent his childhood, More's precocious ability had raised the highest 
hopes. " Whoever may live to see it," the grey-haired statesman used 
to say, "this boy now waiting at table will turn out a marvellous man." 
We have seen the spell which his wonderful learning and the sweet- 
ness of his temper threw at Oxford over Colet and Erasmus ; and, 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



309 



young as he was, More no sooner quitted the University than he 
was known throughout Europe as one of the foremost figures in the 
aew movement. The keen, irregular face, the grey restless eye, the 
thin mobile lips, the tumbled brown hair, the careless gait and dress, 
as they remain stamped on the canvas of Holbein, picture the inner 
soul of the man, his vivacity, his restless, all-devouring intellect, his 
keen and even reckless wit, the kindly, half-sad humour that drew its 
strange veil of laughter and tears over the deep, tender reverence of 
the soul within. In a higher, because in a sweeter and more love- 
able form than Colet, More is the representative of the religious ten- 
dency of the New Learning in England. The young law-student who 
laughed at the superstition and asceticism of the monks of his day 
wore a hair shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for 
the cell he desired among the Carthusians. It was characteristic of 
the man that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian 
Renascence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Sa- 
vonarola, Pico di Mirandola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listened 
to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten and 
his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of heaven and the after-life. 
When he took office, it was with the open stipulation " first to look to 
God, and after God to the King." But in his outer bearing there was 
nothing of the monk or recluse. The brightness and freedom of the 
New Learning seemed incarnate in the young scholar, with his gay 
talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless epigrams, his passionate 
love of music, his omnivorous reading, his paradoxical speculations, 
his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of liberty. But events 
were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay a stern in- 
flexibility of conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars who 
penned declamations against tyrants had covered with their flatteries 
the tyranny of the house of Medici. More no sooner entered Parlia- 
ment than his ready argument and keen sense of justice led to the 
rejection of the Royal demand for a heavy subsidy. "A beardless 
boy," said the courtiers, — and More was only twenty-three, — "has 
disappointed the King's purpose ; " and during the rest of Henry the 
Seventh's reign the young lawyer was forced to withdraw from public 
life. But the withdrawal had little effect on his buoyant activity. He 
rose at once into repute at the bar. He pubhshed his " Life of Edward 
the Fifth," the first work in which what we may call modern EngHsh 
prose appears written with purity and clearness of style and a freedom 
either from antiquated forms of expression or classical pedantry. 
His ascetic dreams were replaced by the affections of home. It 
is when we get a glimpse of him in his house at Chelsea that we 
understand the endearing epithets which Erasmus always lavishes 
upon More. The delight of the young husband was to train the 
girl he had chosen for his wife in his own taste for letters andj 



310 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



for music. The reserve which the age exacted from parents was 
thrown to the winds in M ore's intercourse with his children. He 
loved teaching them, and lured them to their deeper studies by the 
coins and curiosities he had gathered in his cabinet. He was as fond 
of their pets and their games as his children themselves, and would 
take grave scholars and statesmen into the garden to see his girls' 
rabbit-hutches or to watch the gambols of their favourite monkey. 
" I have given you kisses enough," he wrote to his little ones, in merry 
verse, when far away on poHtical business, " but stripes hardly ever." 
The accession of Henry the Eighth dragged him back into the 
political current. It was at his house that Erasmus penned the 
" Praise of Folly," and the work, in its Latin title, "Moriae Encomium," 
embodied in playful fun his love of the extravagant humour of More. 
More " tried as hard to keep out of Court," says his descendant, " as 
most men try to get into it." When the charm of his conversation 
gave so much pleasure to the young sovereign " that he could not 
once in a month get leave to go home to his wife or children, whose 
company he much desired, ... he began thereupon to dissemble 
his nature, and so, little by little, from his former mirth to dissemble 
himself." More shared to the full the disappointment of his friends 
at the sudden outbreak of Henry's warlike temper, but the Peace 
again drew him to the Court, he entered the Royal service, and 
was soon in the King's confidence both as a counsellor and as a 
diplomatist. 

It was on one of his diplomatic missions that More describes 
himself as hearing news of the Kingdom of " Nowhere." " On a cer- 
tain day when I had heard mass in Our Lady's Church, which is 
the fairest, the most gorgeous and curious church of building in all the 
city of Antwerp, and also most frequented of people, and service 
being over I was ready to go home to my lodgings, I chanced to espy 
my friend Peter Gilles talking with a certain stranger, a man well 
stricken in age, with a black sun-burnt face, a large beard, and a 
cloke cast trimly about his shoulders, whom by his favour and appa- 
rell forthwith I judged to be a mariner." The sailor turned out to 
have been a companion of Amerigo Vespucci in those voyages to the 
New World " that be now in print and abroad in every man's hand," and 
on More's invitation he accompanied him to his house, and " there in my 
garden upon a bench covered with green turves we sate down, talking 
together " of the man's marvellous adventures, his desertion in America 
by Vespucci, his wanderings over the country under the equinoctial 
line, and at last of his stay in the Kingdom of " Nowhere." It was 
the story of " Nowhere," or Utopia, which More embodied in the won- 
derful book which reveals to us the heart of the New Learning. As 
yet the movement had been one of scholars and divines. Its plans of 
reform had been almost exclusively intellectual and religious. But in 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



More the same free play of thought which had shaken off the old 
forms of education and faith turned to question the old forms of society 
and politics. From a world where fifteen hundred years of Christian 
teaching had produced social injustice, religious intolerance, and 
poHtical tyranny, the humorist philosopher turned to a " Nowhere," 
in which the mere efforts of natural human virtue realized those 
ends of security, equality, brotherhood, and freedom for which the 
very institution of society seemed to have been framed. It is as he 
wanders through this dreamland of the new reason that More touches 
the great problems which were fast opening before the modern world, 
problems of labour, of crime, of conscience, of government. Merely 
to have seen and to have examined questions such as these would 
prove the keenness of his intellect, but its far-reaching originality is 
shown in the solutions which he proposes. Amidst much that is 
the pure play of an exuberant fancy, much that is mere recollection 
of the dreams of bygone dreamers, we find again and again the 
most important social and political discoveries of later times antici- 
pated by the genius of Thomas More. In some points, such as his 
treatment of the question of Labour, he still remains far in advance of 
current opinion. The whole system of society around him seemed to him 
^* nothing but a conspiracy of the rich against the poor." Its economic 
legislation was simply the carrying out of such a conspiracy by process 
of law. " The rich are ever striving to pare away something further 
from the daily wages of the poor by private fraud and even by public 
law, so that the wTong already existing (for it is a wrong that those 
from whom the State derives most benefit should receive least re- 
ward) is made yet greater by means of the law of the State," " The 
rich devise every means by which they may in the first place secure to 
themselves what they have amassed by wrong, and then take to their 
own use and profit at the lowest possible price the work and labour of 
the poor. And so soon as the rich decide on adopting these devices 
in the name of the public, then they become law," The result was the 
wretched existence to which the labour-class was doomed, " a life so 
wretched that even a beast's life seems enviable." No such cry of pity 
for the poor, of protest against the system of agrarian and manufac- 
turing tyranny which found its expression in the Statutes of Labourers, 
had been heard since the days of Piers Ploughman. But from 
Christendom More turns with a smile to " Nowhere." In " Nowhere" 
the aim of legislation is to secure the welfare, social, industrial, intel- 
lectual, religious, of the community at large, and of the labour-class 
as the true basis of a well-ordered commonwealth. The end of its 
labour-laws was simply the welfare of the labourer. Goods were pos- 
sessed indeed in common, but labour was compulsory with all. The 
period of toil was shortened to the nine hours demanded by modern 
artisans, with a view to the intellectual improvement of the worker. 



312 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



"In the institution of the weal public this end is only and chiefly 
pretended and minded that what time may possibly be spared 
from the necessary occupations and affairs of the commonwealth, all 
that the citizens should withdraw from bodily service, to the free 
liberty of the mind and garnishing of the same. For herein they 
conceive the felicity of this life to consist." A public system of 
education enabled the Utopians to avail themselves of their leisure^ 
While in England half of the population ^' could read no English/' 
every child was well taught in " Nowhere." The physical aspects of 
society were cared for as attentively as its moral. The houses of 
Utopia "in the beginning were very low and like homely cottages or 
poor shepherd huts made at all adventures of every rude piece of timber 
that came first to hand, with mud walls, and ridged roofs thatched 
over with straw." The picture was really that of the common 
English town of More's day, the home of squalor and pestilence. 
In Utopia, however, they had at last come to realize the connection 
between public morality and the health which springs from light, 
air, comfort, and cleanliness. " The streets were twenty feet broad ; 
the houses backed by spacious gardens, and, curiously builded after 
a gorgeous and gallant sort, with their stories one after another. The 
outsides of the walls be made either of hard flint, or of plaster, or else 
of brick ; and the inner sides be well strengthened by timber work. 
The roofs be plain and flat, covered over with plaster so tempered that 
no fire can hurt or perish it, and withstanding the violence of the 
weather better than any lead. They keep the wind out of their 
windows with glass, for it is there much used, and sometimes also 
with fine linen cloth dipped in oil or amber, and that for two commo- 
dities, for by this means more light cometh in and the wind is better 
kept out." 

The same foresight which appears in More's treatment of the ques- 
tions of Labour and the Public Health is yet more apparent in his 
treatment of the question of Crime. He was the first to suggest that 
punishment was less effective in suppressing it than prevention. " If 
you allow your people to be badly taught, their morals to be corrupted 
from childhood, and then when they are men punish them for the veiy 
crimes to which they have been trained in childhood — what is this but 
first to make thieves, and then to punish them ?'' He was the first to 
plead for proportion between the punishment and the crime, and to 
point out the folly of the cruel penalties of his day. " Simple theft is 
not so great an offence as to be punished with death." If a thief and 
a murderer are sure of the same penalty, he points out that the law is 
simply tempting the thief to secure his theft by murder. " While we 
go about to make thieves afraid, we are really provoking them to kill 
good men." The end of all punishment he declares to be reformat 
tion, " nothing else but the destruction of vice and the saving of men." 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



313 



He advises " so using and ordering criminals that they cannot choose 
but be good ; and what harm soever they did before, the residue of 
their lives to make amends for the same." Above all, he urges that to be 
remedial punishment must be wrought out by labour and hope, so that 
" none is hopeless or in despair to recover again his former state of 
freedom by giving good tokens and likelihood of himself that he will 
ever after that live a true and honest man." It is not too much to say 
that in the great principles More lays down he anticipated every one of 
the improvements in our criminal system which have distinguished the 
last hundred years. His treatment of the religious question was even 
more in advance of his age. If the houses of Utopia were strangely 
in contrast with the halls of England, where the bones from every 
dinner lay rotting in the dirty straw which strewed the floor, where 
the smoke curled about the rafters, and the wind whistled through 
the unglazed windows ; if its penal legislation had little likeness to the 
gallows which stood out so frequently against our English sky ; the 
religion of *' Nowhere " was in yet stronger conflict with the faith of 
•Christendom. It rested simply on nature and reason. It held that 
God's design was the happiness of man, and that the ascetic rejection 
of human delights, save for the common good, was thanklessness to 
the Giver. Christianity, indeed, had already reached Utopia, but it 
had few priests ; religion found its centre rather in the family than in 
the congregation : and each household confessed its faults to its own 
natural head. A yet stranger characteristic was seen in the peaceable 
way in which it lived side by side with the older religions. More than 
a century before William of Orange, More discerned and proclaimed 
the great principle of religious toleration. In " Nowhere" it was lawful 
to every man to be of what religion he would. Even the disbelievers 
in a Divine Being or in the immortality of man, who by a single 
exception to its perfect religious indifference were excluded from 
public office, were excluded, not on the ground of their religious belief, 
but because their opinions were believed to be degrading to mankind, 
and therefore to incapacitate those who held them from governing in 
a noble temper. But even these were subject to no punishment, be- 
cause the people of Utopia were " persuaded that it is not in a 
man's power to believe what he list." The religion which a man held 
he might propagate by argument, though not by violence or insult 
to the religion of others. But while each sect perfonned its rites 
in private, all assembled for public worship in a spacious temple, 
where the vast throng, clad in white, and grouped round a priest 
clothed in fair raiment wrought mai*vellously out of birds' plumage, 
joined in hymns and prayers so framed as to be acceptable to 
all. The importance of this public devotion lay in the evi- 
dence it afforded that Hberty of conscience could be combined 
with religious unity. 



Sec. IV. 

The Nett 
Learning. 

1509. 

1520. 



3^4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Section v.— Wolsey. 1515—1631. 

[Authorities. — The chronicler Hall, who wrote under Edward the Sixth, has 
been copied for Henry the Eighth's reign by Grafton, and followed by Holin- 
shed. But for any real knowledge of Wolsey's administration we must turn 
to the invaluable prefaces which Professor Brewer has prefixed to the Calen- 
dars of State Papers for this period, and to the State Papers themselves.] 



" There are many things in the commonwealth of Nowhere, which 
I rather wish than hope to see adopted in our own." It was with 
these words of characteristic irony that More closed the great work 
which embodied the dreams of the New Learning. Destined as they 
were to fulfilment in the course of ages, its schemes of social, religious, 
and political reform broke helplessly against the temper of the time. 
At the very moment when More was pleading the cause of justice 
between rich and poor, the agrarian discontent was being fanned by 
exactions into a fiercer flame. While he aimed sarcasm after sarcasm 
against King-worship, despotism was being organized into a system. 
His advocacy of the two principles of religious toleration and Christian 
comprehension coincides almost to a year with the opening of the 
strife between the Reformation and the Papacy. 

^' That Luther has a fine genius," laughed Leo the Tenth, when 
he heard that a German Professor had nailed some Propositions 
denouncing the abuse of Indulgences, or of the Papal power to remit 
certain penalties attached to the commission of sins, against the doors 
of the church at Wittenberg. But the " Quarrell of Friars," as the 
controversy was termed contemptuously at Rome, soon took larger 
proportions. If at the outset Luther flung himself " prostrate at the 
feet " of the Papacy, and owned its voice as the voice of Christ, the 
formal sentence of Leo no sooner confirmed the doctrine of Indul- 
gences than their opponent appealed to a future Council of the Church. 
Two years later the rupture was complete. A Papal Bull formally 
condemned the errors of the Reformer. The condemnation was met 
with defiance, and Luther publicly consigned the Bull to the flames. 
A second condemnation expelled him from the bosom of the Churchy 
and the ban of the Empire was soon added to that of the Papacy. 
" Here stand I ; I can none other," Luther replied to the young 
Emperor, Charles the Fifth, as he pressed him to recant in the Diet 
of Worms ; and from the hiding-place in the Thuringian Forest 
where he was sheltered by the Elector of Saxony he denounced not 
merely,' as at first, the abuses of the Papacy, but the Papacy itself. 
The heresies of Wyclif were revived ; the infallibility, the authority 
of the Roman See, the truth of its doctrines, the efficacy of its worship, 
w^ere denied and scoffed at in the vigorous pamphlets which issued 



VL] 



THE NE W MONARCHY, 



315 



from his retreat, and were dispersed throughout the world by the new 
printing-press. The old resentment of Germany against the oppres- 
sion of Rome, the moral revolt in its more religious minds against 
the secularity and corruption of the Church, the disgust of the New 
Learning at its superstition and ignorance, combined to secure for 
Luther a wide-spread popularity and the protection of the northern 
princes of the Empire. In England however his protest found as yet 
no echo : its only effect indeed was to rouse again the old spirit of 
persecution. Luther's works were solemnly burnt in St. Paul's, here- 
tical publications were ordered to be delivered up, and fresh orders 
were issued for the prosecution of heretics in the Bishops' Courts, 
The young King himself, proud of a theological knowledge in which 
he stood alone among the sovereigns of Europe, entered the lists 
against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments," for 
which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of " Defender of the 
Faith." The insolent abuse of the Reformer's answer called More 
and Fisher into the field. As yet the New Learning, though scared 
by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily backed him in his 
struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor ; Ulrich von 
Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent as his 
own. But the temper of the Revival was even more antagonistic to 
the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself. From the golden 
dream of a new age, wrought peaceably and purely by the slow pro- 
gress of intelligence, the growth of letters, the development of hu-man 
virtue, the Reformer of Wittenburg turned away with horror. He had 
little or no sympathy with the new culture. He despised reason as 
heartily as any Papal dogmatist could despise it. He hated the very 
thought of toleration or comprehension. He had been driven by a 
moral and intellectual compulsion to declare the Roman system a false 
one^ but it was only to replace it by another system of doctrine just as 
elaborate, and claiming precisely the same infalHbility. To degrade 
human nature was to attack the very base of the New Learning ; 
but Erasmus no sooner advanced to its defence than Luther declared 
man 10 be utterly enslaved by original sin and incapable through any 
efforts of his own of discovering truth or of arriving at goodness. 
Such a doctrine not only annihilated the piety and wisdom of the 
classic past, from which the New Learning had drawn its larger 
views of life and of the world ; it trampled in the dust reason itself, 
the very instrument by which More and Erasmus hoped to regene- 
rate both knowledge and religion. To More especially, with his 
keener perception of its future effect, this sudden revival of a 
purely theological and dogmatic spirit, severing Christendom into 
warring camps, and annihilating all hopes of union and tolerance, 
wp^ especially hateful. The temper which hitherto had seemed so 
"endearing, gentle, and happy," suddenly gave way. His reply to 



3i6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Luther's attack upon the King sank to the level of the work it 
answered. That of Fisher was calmer and more argumentative ; 
but the divorce of the New Learning from the Reformation was | 
complete. 

Nor were the political hopes of the " Utopia" destined to be realized 
by the minister who at the close of Henry's early war with France 
mounted rapidly into power. Thomas Wolsey, the son of a wealthy 
townsman of Ipswich, who had risen to the post of Royal Chaplam, 
was taken by Bishop Fox, at the death of Henry the Seventh, into 
the political service of the crown. His extraordinary abilities hardly 
perhaps required the songs, dances, and carouses with his indulgence 
in which he was taunted by his enemies, to aid him in winning 
the favour of the young sovereign. From the post of favourite he 
soon rose to that of minister. Henry's resentment at Ferdinand's 
perfidy and at the ridiculous results of the vast efforts and expense 
of the war against France broke the Spanish alliance to which his 
father and the ministers whom his father had left him so steadily 
clung. The retirement of Fox made way for Wolsey, and the policy 
of the new statesman reversed that of his predecessors. It was the 
friendship of England which encouraged Francis the First to attempt 
the reconquest of Lombardy, and even his victory of Marignano failed 
to rouse a jealousy of French aggression, though by treaties and 
subsidies to its opponents Wolsey managed to limit the conquests 
of France to the Milanese. A French alliance meant simply a policy 
of peace, and the administration of Wolsey amidst all its ceaseless 
diplomacy aimed steadily at keeping England out of war. The Peace, 
as we have seen, restored the hopes of the New Learning ; it enabled 
Colet to reform education, Erasmus to undertake the regeneration 
of the Church, More to set on foot a nev/ science of Politics. But 
peace as Wolsey used it was fatal to English freedom. In the 
political hints which lie scattered over the "Utopia" More notes 
with bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in 
" Nowhere" that a sovereign was " removable on suspicion of a design 
to enslave his people." In England the work of slavery was being, 
quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. "There 
will never be wanting some pretence for deciding in the King's 
favour ; as, that equity is on his side, or the strict letter of the law, 
or some forced interpretation of it ; or if none of these, that the 
Royal prerogative ought with conscientious judges to outweigh all 
other considerations." We are startled at the precision with which 
More maps out the expedients by which the law courts were to 
lend themselves to the advance of tyranny xlU their crowning judg- 
ment in the case of Ship-money. I3ut behind these judicial expe*- 
dients lay great principles of absolutism, which partly from the example 
of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and political 



♦ 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



317 



insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the Crown, were 
gradually winning their way in public opinion. " These notions," he 
goes boldly on, " are fostered by the maxim that the King can do no 
wrong, however much he may wish to do it ; that not only the property ; 
but the persons of his subjects are his own ; and that a man has a right 
to no more than the King's goodness thinks fit not to take from him/' 
In the hands of Wolsey these maxims were transformed into princi- 
ples of State. The check which had been imposed on the Royal 
power by the presence of great prelates and nobles at the Council 
was practically removed. All authority was concentrated in the hands 
of a single minister. The whole direction of home and foreign 
affairs rested with Wolsey alone ; as Chancellor he stood at the head 
of public justice ; his elevation to the office of Legate rendered him 
supreme in the Church. Enormous as was the mass of work which 
he undertook, it was thoroughly done : his administration of the Royal 
treasury was economical ; the number of his despatches is hardly less re- 
markable than the care bestowed upon each ; as Chancellor even More 
— his avowed enemy — confesses that he surpassed all men's expectation. 
The Court of Chancery, indeed, became so crowded with business 
through the character for expedition and justice which it acquired under 
his rule, that subordinate courts — one of which, that of the Master of 
the Rolls, still remains — had to be created for its relief. It was this vast 
concentration of all secular and ecclesiastical power in a single hand 
which accustomed England to the personal government which began 
with Henry the Eighth ; and it was, above all, Wolse/s long tenure of 
the whole Papal authority within the realm, and the consequent sus 
pension of appeals to Rome, that led men to acquiesce at a later time 
in Henry's religious supremacy. For great as was Wolsey's pride, he 
regarded himself and proclaimed himself simply as the creature of the 
King. Henry had munificently rewarded his services to the crown. 
He had been raised to the See of Lincoln and the Archbishopric of 
York, the revenues of two other Sees whose tenants were foreigners 
were in his hands, he was Bishop of Winchester and Abbot of St. 
Albans, he was in receipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his 
official emoluments were enormous. His ambition was glutted at last 
with the rank of Cardinal. His pomp was almost royal. A train of 
prelates ^nd nobles followed him wherever he moved ; his household 
was composed of five hundred persons of noble birth, and its chief 
posts were held by knights and barons of the realm. He spent his 
■vast wealth with princely ostentation. Two of his houses, Hampton 
Court and York House (under its name of Whitehall), were splendid 
■enough to serve at his fall for Royal palaces. His school at Ipswich 
was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, whose name 
of Cardinal College has been lost in its later title of Christ-church. 
But all this mass of power and wealth Wolsey held, and owned that 



Sec. V. 

Wolsey. 
1515- 
1531. 



3i8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



he held, simply at the Royal will. In raising his favourite to the head 
of Church and of State Henry was simply gathering all religious as 
well as all civil authority into his personal grasp. The nation which 
trembled before Wolsey learned to tremble before the King who could 
destroy Wolsey by a breath. 

That Henry's will was supreme in the State was proved by his 
rough repudiation, after nine years of peace, of the policy on which 
all the Cardinal's plans of administration were based. The Spanish 
cause was popular among the English nobility, and it was resolutely 
advocated by the Duke of Buckingham, who stood at their head. 
Wolsey met the Duke's opposition with a charge of treason, to 
which the fact of his descent from Edward the Third gave a fatal 
weight. Buckingham had sworn that in the event of Henry's ceasing 
to live he would bring the Cardinal's head to the block, and the 
boast was tortured into the crime of imagining the King's death. 
The peers were forced to doom the chief of their order to a traitor's 
punishment ; but the Queen, Catherine of Arragon, still upheld the 
partisans of Spain, and Henry was himself weary of a policy of 
peace. Disappointed in his hopes of attaining the Imperial crown 
on the death of Maximilian, he ceased to believe Wolsey's flat- 
tering assurances that in the balanced contest between Spain and 
France he was the arbiter of Europe ; while the dream of " recovering 
his French inheritance," which he had never really abandoned, was 
carefully fed by his nephew Charles, who had inherited Flanders as 
heir to the Dukes of Burgundy, Austria as heir to Maximilian, and 
Castile as the son of Juana, had mounted the throne of Arragon on 
the death of his grandfather, Ferdinand, and by his election as Empe- 
ror had become in his earliest manhood the mightiest power in Chris- 
tendom. It was in vain that Francis strove to retain Henry's 
friendship by an interview near Guisnes, to which the profuse expen- 
diture of both monarchs gave the name of the Field of Cloth of Gold ; 
in vain that Wolsey endeavoured to avert the struggle by conferences, 
and to delay the visit of Charles to England. The meeting of the 
Emperor with Henry at Southampton gave the signal for a renewal 
of the war. Henry was fascinated by the persuasions and promises 
of his young nephew, and the French alliance came to an end. In 
the first result of the new war policy at home we can see the reason' for 
Wolsey's passionate adherence to a pohcy of peace. With the instinct 
of despotism he had seen that the real danger which menaced the 
New Monarchy lay in the tradition of the English Parliament ; and 
though Henry had thrice called together the Houses to supply the 
expenses of his earlier struggle with France, Wolsey governed during 
eight years of peace without once assembhng them. The ordinary 
resources of the Crown, however, were inadequate to meet the ex- 
penses of war, but so strong was Wolsey's antipathy to Parliaments 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



319 



that he resorted to a measure of arbitrary taxation whose success 
would have rendered it needless ever to convoke Parliament again. 
A forced loan was assessed upon the whole kingdom. Twenty thou- 
sand pounds were exacted from London ; and its wealthier citizens 
were summoned before the Cardinal and required to give an account 
of the value of their estates. Commissioners were despatched into 
every county for the purpose of assessment, and precepts were issued 
on their information, requiring in some cases supplies of soldiers, in 
others a tenth of a man's annual income, for the King's service. So 
poor, however, was the return that in the following year Wolsey was 
forced to summon Parliament and lay before it the unprecedented 
demand of a property-tax of twenty per cent. The demand was 
made by the Cardinal in person, but he was received with obstinate 
silence. It was in vain that Wolsey called on member after member to 
speak ; and his appeal to More, who had been elected to the chair of the 
House of Commons, was met by the Speaker's falling on his knees and 
representing his powerlessness to reply till he had received instructions 
from the House itself. The effort to overawe the Commons failed, and 
Wolsey no sooner withdrew than an angry debate began. He again 
returned to answer the objections which had been raised, and again 
the Commons foiled the unconstitutional attempt to influence their 
deliberations by refusing to discuss the matter in his presence. The 
struggle continued for a fortnight ; and though successful in procuring 
a subsidy, the Court party were forced to content themselves with less 
than half Wolsey's demand. His anger at this burst of sturdy in- 
dependence flung back the Cardinal on the system of Benevolences. 
A tenth was demanded from the laity, and a fourth from the clergy in 
every county by the Royal Commissioners. There was " sore grudging 
and murmuring " — Warham wrote to the Court — " among the people." 
" If men should give their goods by a commission," said the Kentish 
squires, "then it would be worse than the taxes of France, and 
England should be bond not free." The keen political instinct of the 
nation already discerned that in the question of self-taxation was in- 
volved that of the very existence of freedom. The clergy put themselves 
in the forefront of the resistance, and preached from every pulpit that 
the commission was contrary to the liberties of the realm, and that 
the King could take no man's goods but by process of law. So 
stirred was the nation that Wolsey bent to the storm, and offered to 
rely on the voluntary benevolences of each subject. But the Act which 
declared all Benevolences illegal was recalled to memory, and the 
demand was evaded by London, while the Commissioners were driven 
out of Kent. A revolt, indeed, which broke out in Suffolk was only 
prevented from spreading by the unconditional withdrawal of the 
Royal demand. 
Wolsey's defeat saved English freedom for the moment; but the 



320 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



danger from which he shrank was not merely that of a conflict with the 
sense of liberty. The murmurs of the Kentish squires only swelled the 
ever-deepening voice of public discontent. If the condition of the 
land question in the end gave strength to the Crown by making it the 
security for public order, it became a terrible peril at every crisis of 
conflict between the monarchy and the landowners. The steady rise 
in the price of wool was at this period giving a fresh impulse to the 
agrarian changes which had been going steadily on for the last 
hundred years, to the throwing together of the smaller holdings, and 
the introduction of sheep-farming on an enormous scale. The merchant 
classes, too, whose prosperity we have already noticed, were investing 
largely in land, and these " farming gentlemen and clerking knights," 
as Latimer bitterly styled them, were restrained by few traditions or 
associations in their eviction of the smaller tenants. The land, 
indeed, had been greatly underlet ; " that which went heretofore for 
twenty or forty pounds a year," we learn from the same source, " now 
is let for fifty or a hundred ; " and the new purchasers were quick in 
making profit by a general rise in rents. It had been only by the low 
scale of rent, indeed, that the small yeomanry class had been enabled to 
exist. "My father," says Latimer, " was a yeoman, and had no lands 
of his own ; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the 
uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He 
had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine • he 
was able and did find the King a harness with himself and his horse while 
he came to the place that he should receive the King's wages. I can 
remember that I buckled his harness when he went to Blackheath 
Field. He kept me to school : he married my sisters with five pounds 
apiece, so that he brought them up in godhness and fear of God. He 
kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the 
poor, and all this he did of the same farm, where he that now hath it 
payeth sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to do anything 
for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink 
to the poor." The bitterness of ejection was increased by the iniquitous 
means which were often employed to bring it about. The farmers, if 
we believe More, were " got rid of either by fraud or force, or tired 
out with repeated wrongs into parting with their property." " In this 
way it comes to pass that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, 
orphans, widows, parents with little children, households greater in 
number than in wealth (for arable farming requires many hands, while 
one shepherd and herdsman will suffice for a pasture farm), all these 
emigrate from their native fields without knowing where to go." The 
sale of their scanty household stuff drove them to wander homeless 
abroad, to be thrown into prison as vagabonds, to beg and to steal. 
Yet in the face of such a spectacle as this v/e still find the old com- 
plaint of scarcity of labour, and the old legal remedy for it in a fixed 



ivi.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



321 



scale of wages. The social disorder, in fact, baffled Wolsey's sagacity, 
and he could find no better remedy for it than laws against the further 
extension of sheep-farms, and a terrible increase of pubhc executions. 
Both were alike fruitless. Enclosures and evictions went on as 
before. "If you do not remedy the evils which produce thieves," 
More urged with bitter truth, " the rigorous execution of justice in 
punishing thieves Avill be vain." But even More could only suggest 
a remedy which, efficacious as it was subsequently to prove, had yet 
to wait a century for its realization. " Let the woollen manufacture be 
introduced, so that honest employment may be found for those whom 
want has made thieves, or will make thieves ere long." The mass of 
social disorder grew steadily greater ; while the break up of the great 
mihtary households of the nobles which was still going on, and the 
return of wounded and disabled soldiers from the wars, introduced 
a yet more dangerous leaven of outrage and crime. 

This public discontent, as well as the exhaustion of the treasury, added 
bitterness to the miserable result of the war. To France, indeed, the 
struggle had been disastrous, for the loss of the Milanese and the cap- 
ture of Francis the First in the defeat of Pavia laid her at the feet of 
the Emperor. But England, as before, gained nothing from tv-j use- 
less campaigns, and in the heat of Henry's disappointment Wolsey 
found it possible again to negotiate a peace. Falling back on his old 
policy, he drew closer the French alliance and gave a cautious support 
to Francis ; while he carefully abstained from any part in the fresh war 
which broke out on the refusal of the French monarch to fulfil the 
terms by which he had purchased his release. But the CardinaFs mind 
was already dwelling on a step by which he hoped to make any new 
return to the Spanish policy impossible. As a princess of Spain, and 
aunt to the Emperor, the Queen, Catherine of Arragon, stood at the head 
of the Spanish party ; and Wolsey bitterly resented the part she had 
taken in the recent breach with France. But the death of child after 
child, and the want of a son, had already roused a superstitious dread 
in Henry's mind that his marriage with a brother's widow, though sanc- 
tioned by the Church, was marked with the curse of Heaven. In the 
King's dread, Wolsey saw the opportunity of sowing a deadly quarrel 
between England and Spain. From whatever quarter the notion of a 
divorce was first suggested to Henry, it was at once supported by the 
Cardinal. It was probably at his suggestion that doubts were expressed 
as to the validity of the King's marriage and on the legitimacy of its 
issue, the Lady Mary, by the French negotiators of the treaty of alhance. 
Wolsey was looking forward, not only to a breach with the Emperor, 
but to the supplying Catherine's place with a princess of France. 
But the desires of Henry outran the policy of his minister. His 
conscientious scruples were suddenly quickened by the charms of 
Anne Boleyn, a young lady of his Court ; and this passion, neglected 

Y 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and despised by Wolsey as a mere intrigue of gallantry, was skil- 
fully fanned by the gay beauty and dexterous reserve of Anne herself, 
as well as by the support of the Duke of Norfolk, with whose family 
her own was connected. At a moment when no communication had 
as yet been made to the world of his desire for a divorce, nor any 
application laid before the Pope for the annulling of his former 
marriage, Henry suddenly announced to the Cardinal his resolve on 
the new union. The remonstrances v/hich Wolsey offered on his 
knees were only atoned for by his promise of fresh zeal in the cause of 
the divorce. But the matter was no sooner divulged than its diffi- 
culties became manifest. In the Royal Council itself it received 
small support. The most learned of the English bishops, Fisher of 
Rochester, declared openly against it. The English theologians, who 
were consulted on the validity of the Papal dispensation which had 
allowed Henry's marriage to take place, referred the King to the 
Pope for a decision of the question. The commercial classes shrank 
from a step which involved an irretrievable breach with the Emperor, 
who was master of their great market in Flanders. Above all, the 
iniquity of the proposal jarred against the public conscience. But 
neither danger nor shame availed against the King's wilfulness 
and passion. Wolsey's suggestions of caution met only with re- 
proaches, and Henry's confidence was fatally lost as the Cardinal 
became suspected of covert opposition to his favourite project. Nor- 
folk and Anne Boleyn's father, created at a later time Lord Roch- 
ford, who gained more and more the upper hand in the Council, 
pushed the divorce resolutely on. It was in vain that Clement the 
Seventh, perplexed at once by his wish to gratify Henry, his own 
conscientious doubts as to the possibility of the course proposed, 
and his terror of the Emperor, whose power was now predominant in 
Italy, suggested that the King should act on his own responsibility. ' 
Henry was resolute in demanding a legal declaration of the invalidity A 
of the Papal bull on which his first marriage rested, and the Pope was « 
forced at last to issue a commission to the Cardinals Wolsey and Cam- 
peggio for a trial of the facts on which the King's application was based. 
Months, however, passed in negotiations for the purpose of evading such 
an issue. The Cardinals pressed on Catherine the expediency of her 
withdrawal to a religious house, while Henry pressed on the Pope that of 
a settlement of the matter by his formal declaration against the validity 
of the marriage. It was not till both efforts had failed that the Court , 
met at the Blackfriars. The Queen, who saw in Wolsey her enemy 
rather than a judge, only appeared to offer an appeal to Clement ; and 
on the refusal of the Cardinals to admit it she flung herself at Henry's 
feet. " Sire," said Catherine, " I beseech you to pity me, a woman and 
a stranger, without an assured friend and without an indifferent coun- 
sellor. I take God to witness that I have always been to you a truQ 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



and loyal wife, that I have made it my constant duty to seek your 
pleasure, that I have loved all whom you loved, ^vhether I have reason 
or not, whether they are friends to me or foes. I have been your wife 
for years, I have brought you many children. God knows that when 
I came to your bed I was a virgin, and I put it to your own conscience 
o say whether it was not so. If there be any offence which can be 
alleo-ed ao-ainst me I consent to depart with infamy : if not, then I 
pray you to do me justice." The piteous appeal was wasted on a 
King who was already entertaining Anne Boleyn with royal state in 
his own palace. The case proceeded ; but Clement, who was now 
wholly in the Emperor's hands, had already cited it before him at 
Rome ; and the Cardinals, though as yet ignorant of the Pope's de- 
cision, decided on an adjournment for the purpose of consulting him 
as to the judgment they should pronounce. 

'' Never did Cardinal bring good to England," exclaimed Wolsey's 
bitter enemy, the Duke of Suffolk, as the court adjourned. " Of all 
men living," Wolsey boldly retorted, " you, my lord Duke, have the least 
reason to dispraise Cardinals, for if I, a poor Cardinal, had not been, 
you would not now have had a head on your shoulders w^herewith to 
make such a brag in disrepute of us." But both the Cardinal and his 
enemies knew that the minister's doom was sealed. Henry, who had 
throughout suspected him of being no friend to his project, was furious 
at the sudden scruples of conscience which frustrated his will. Wolsey 
was at once banished from the Court, and a promise was extorted from 
her royal lover by Anne Boleyn to see him no more. The Duke of 
Norfolk, who took his place at the Council board, was not only the head 
of her own party but the chief opponent of the French alliance ; and 
his belief that the divorce had been hindered only by the ill-will of 
the Emperor to Wolsey induced Henry to draw nearer again to Spain, 
and to seek to obtain his object by negotiation with Charles himself. 
But the utter ruin of the discarded minister was necessary for the 
success of the new policy, and the Cardinal was at once prosecuted 
for a transgression of the Statute of Pr^munire by holding his 
Court as Legate within the realm. Wolsey was prostrated by the 
blow. He offered to give up everything he possessed if the King 
would but cease from his displeasure. " His face," wrote the French 
ambassador, " is dwindled to half its natural size. In truth, his misery 
is such that his enemies, Englishmen as they are, cannot help pitying 
him." Office and wealth were flung desperately at the King's feet, 
and for a time ruin seemed averted. A thousand boats full of London 
citizens covered the Thames to see the Cardinal's barge pass to the 
Tower, but he was permitted to retire to Esher, and Henry for the 
moment seemed content with his disgrace. Pardon was granted him 
on the surrender of his vast possessions to the Crown, and he was 
ordered to proceed at once to his Archbishopric, the one dignity he 

Y 2 



Sec. V. 

Wolsey. 
1515- 
1531. 



The FaU 

of 
Woisey^ 



324 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



was suffered to retain. But hardly a year had passed before his 
popularity in the north revived the jealousy of his political rivals, and 
on the eve of his installation-feast he was arrested on a charge of 
high treason, and conducted by the Lieutenant of the Tower towards 
London. Already broken by his enormous labours, by internal 
disease, and the sense of his fall, the old man accepted the arrest as 
a sentence of death. An attack of dysentery forced him to rest at 
the Abbey of Leicester, and as he reached the gate he said feebly 
to the brethren who met him, " I am come to lay my bones among you." 
On his death-bed his thoughts still clung to the prince whom he had 
served. " He is a Prince," said the dying man to the Lieutenant of 
the Tower, " of a most royal courage : sooner than miss any part of 
his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom : and I do assure 
you I have often kneeled before him, sometimes for three hours to- 
gether, to persuade him from his appetite, and could not prevail. 
And, Master Knygton, had I but served God as diligently as I have 
served the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. 
But this is my due reward for my pains and study, not regarding 
my service to God, but only my duty to my prince." No words 
could paint with so terrible a truthfulness the spirit of the New 
Monarchy, which Wolsey had done more than any of those who went 
before him to raise into an overwhelming despotism. All sense of 
loyalty to England, to its freedom, to its institutions, had utterly 
passed away. The one duty which fills the statesman's mind is a 
duty " to his prince," a prince whose personal will and appetite was 
overriding the highest interests of the State, tramphng under foot 
the wisest councils, and crushing with the bhnd ingratitude of a Fate 
the servants who opposed him. But even Wolsey, while he recoiled 
from the monstrous form which he had created, could hardly have 
dreamed of the work of destruction which the royal courage, and 
yet more royal appetite, of his, master was to accomplish in the years 
to come. 

Section. VI.— Thomas Cromwell. 1530—154-0. 

\_Attt/iorities. — Cromwell's early life, as told by Foxe, is a mass of fable ; 
what we really know of it, may be seen conveniently put together in Dean 
Hook's *'Life of Archbishop Cranmer/' For his ministry, the only real 
authorities are the State Papers for this period, which are now being calendared 
for the Master of the Rolls, For the close of Sir Thomas More, see the 
touching account in his Life by Roper. The more important documents for the 
religious history of the time will be found in Mr. Pocock's new edition- of 
"Burnet's History of the Reformation"; those relating to the dissolution of 
the Monasteries, in the collection of letters on that subject published by the 
Camden Society, and inthe ** Original Letters " of Sir Henry Ellis. A mass of 
material of very various rvalue has been accumulated by Strype in his collections, 
which begin at this time. Mr. Froude's narrative (*' History of England," 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



325 



vols. i. ii. iii. ), though of great literary merit, is disfigured by a love of paradox, 
by hero-v^rorship, and by a reckless defence of tyranny and crime. It possesses, 
during this period, little or no historical value.] 

The ten years which follow the fall of Wolsey are among the most 
momentous in our history. The New Monarchy at last realized 
its power, and the work for which Wolsey had paved the way was 
carried out with a terrible thoroughness. The one great institution 
which could still offer resistance to the Royal will was struck down. 
The Church became a mere instrument of the central despotism. The 
people learned their helplessness in rebellions easily suppressed and 
avenged with ruthless severity. A reign of terror, organized with 
consummate and merciless skill, held England panic-stricken at 
Henry's feet. The noblest heads rolled on the block. Virtue and 
learning could not save Thomas More : royal descent could not save 
Lady Salisbury. The execution of queen after queen taught England 
that nothing was too high for Henry's '^ courage," or too sacred for his 
'^ appetite." Parliament assembled only to sanction acts of unscru- 
pulous tyranny, or to build up by its own statutes the great fabric of 
absolute rule. All the constitutional safe-guards of English freedom 
were swept away. Arbitrary taxation, arbitrary legislation, arbitrary 
imprisonment were powers claimed without dispute and unsparingly 
exercised by the Crown. 

The history of this great revolution, for it is nothing less, is the 
history of a single man. In the whole line of English statesmen there 
is no one of whom we would willingly know so much, no one of whom 
we really know so little, as of Thomas Cromwell. When he meets us in 
Henry's service he is already past middle life ; and during his earlier 
years it is hardly possible to do more than disentangle a few frag- 
mentary facts from the mass of fable which gathered round them. His 
youth was one of roving adventure ; whether he was the son of a poor 
blacksmith at Putney or no, he could hardly have been more than a 
boy when he was engaged in the service cf the Marchioness of Dorset. 
He must still have been young when he took part as a common 
soldier in the. wars of Italy, a "ruffian," as he owned afterwards to 
Cranmer, in the most unscrupulous school the world contained. But 
it was a school in which he learned lessons even more dangerous than 
those of the camp. He not only mastered the Italian language, but 
drank in the manners and tone of the Italy around him, the Italy of 
the Borgias and the Medici. It was with Italian versatility that he 
turned from the camp to the counting-house ; he was certainly engaged 
as the commercial agent to one of the Venetian merchants ; tradition 
finds him as a clerk at Antwerp, and history at last encounters him as 
a thriving wool merchant at Middleborough a few years after the open- 
ing of Henry's reign. By adding the trade of scrivener, something 



Sec. VI. 

Thomas 

Cromwell. 

1530- 

154.0- 

Thoxnas 
Crom- 
well 



151a. 



326 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Norfollt 

and 
More. 



between that of a banker and attorney, to his other occupations, as well 
as by advancing money to the poorer nobles, Cromwell continued to 
amass wealth as years went on ; and on the outbreak of the second 
war with France we find him a busy and influential member of the 
Commons in Parliament. Five years later the aim of his ambition 
was declared by his entrance into Wolsey's service. The Cardinal 
needed a man of business for the suppression of some smaller monas- 
teries which he had undertaken, and for the transfer of their revenues 
to his foundations at Oxford and Ipswich. The task was an unpopular 
one, and it was carried out with a rough indifference to the feelings it 
aroused which involved Cromwell in the hate which was gathering 
round his master. But his wonderful self-reliance and sense of power 
only broke upon the world at Wolsey's fall. Of the hundreds of 
dependents who waited on the Cardinal's nod, Cromwell v/as the 
only one Avho clung faithfully to him at the last. In the lonely hours of 
his disgrace at Esher, Wolsey " made his moan unto Master Cromwell, 
who comforted him the best he could, and desired my Lord to give him. 
leave to go to London, where he would make or mar, which was 
always his common saying." The next day saw him admitted to 
Henry's service, but still vigorous in his exertions to save the 
Cardinal. It v/as to Cromwell's efforts in Parliament that Wolsey 
owed his escape from impeachment, and it was by him that the 
negotiations were conducted which permitted the fallen minister to 
retire to York. A general esteem seems to have rewarded this rare 
instance of fidelity to a ruined patron. " For his honest behaviour 
in his master's cause he was esteemed the most faithfullest servant, 
and was of all men greatly commended." But Henry's protection 
rested on other grounds. The ride to London had ended in a private 
interview with the King, in v/hich Cromwell boldly advised him to 
cut the knot of the divorce by the simple exercise of his own 
Supremacy. The advice struck the key-note of the later policy by 
which the daring counsellor was to change the whole face of Church 
and State, but Henry still clung to the hopes held out by his new] 
ministers, and shrunk perhaps as yet from the bare absolutism to. 
which Cromwell called him. The advice at any rate was concealed 
and, though high in the King's favour, his new servant waited patiently 
the progress of events. 

For success in procuring the divorce Norfolk relied not only on the 
alliance and aid of the Emperor, but on the moral support which the pro- 
ject was expected to receive from the Parliament. The reassembling 
of the two Houses marked the close of the system of Wolsey. It 
was a step in fact which we can hardly err in attributing to the in- 
fluence of the adherents whom Norfolk found in the party of the 
New Learning. To them, as to his mere political adversaries, the 
Cardinal's fall opened a prospect of better things. The dream of More 



II 



•71.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



327 



in accepting the office of Chancellor, if we may judge it from the acts 
of his brief ministry, seems to have been that of carrying out the 
religious reformation which had been demanded by Colet and Erasmus, 
while checking the spirit of revolt against the unity of the Church. His 
severities against the Protestants, exaggerated as they have been by 
polemic rancour, remain the one stain on a memory that knows no 
other. But it was only by a rigid severance of the cause of reform, 
from what seemed to him the cause of revolution, that More probably 
hoped for a successful issue to the projects he laid before Parliament. 
The Petition of the Commons sounded like an echo of Colet's famous 
address to the Convocation. It attributed the growth of heresy not 
more to '' frantic and seditious books published in the English tongue 
contrary to the very true Catholic and Christian faith ^^ than to " the 
extreme and uncharitable behaviour of divers ordinaries." It remon- 
strated against the legislation of the clergy in Convocation without the 
King's assent or that of his subjects, the oppressive procedure of the 
Church Courts, the abuses of ecclesiastical patronage, and the excessive 
number of holydays. Henry referred the Petition to the bishops, but 
their only reply was a refusal of redress. The new ministry persisted, 
however, in pushing through the Commons their bills for ecclesiastical 
reform. The questions of Convocation and the Bishops' Courts were 
adjourned for further consideration, but the fees of the Courts were 
curtailed, the clergy restricted from lay employments, pluralities re- 
strained, and residence enforced. In spite of a dogged opposition from 
the bishops the bills received the assent of the House of Lords, "to the 
great rejoicing of lay people, and the great displeasure of spiritual 
persons." The importance of the new measures lay really in the action 
of Parliament. They were an explicit announcement that church-reform 
was now to be undertaken, not by the clergy, but by the people at large. 
On the other hand, it was clear that it would be carried out, not in a 
spirit of hostility, but of loyalty to the Church. The Commons forced 
from Bishop Fisher an apology for words which were taken as a doubt 
thrown on their orthodoxy. If Henry forbad the circulation of a trans- 
lation of the Bible executed by Tyndale in a Protestant spirit, he 
carefully promised a more correct version. More devoted himself to 
the task of crushing by a strict execution of the laws the hopes raised 
in the minds of the sectaries by the fall of Wolsey. But the domestic 
aims of the New Learning were foiled by the failure of the Ministry 
in its negotiations for the divorce. The severance of the French 
alliance and the accession of the Spanish party to power failed to 
detach Charles from his aunt's cause. The solemn remonstrance of 
the Parliament against the Pope's delay of justice produced little 
effect on Clement, who was now looking to the Emperor for the 
restoration of Florence to his Medicean house. The ministers eagerly 
accepted the suggestion of a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Cranmer, 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



that the universities of Europe should be called on for their judgment ; 
but the appeal to the learned opinion of Christendom ended in utter 
defeat. In France the profuse bribery of the English agents would 
have failed with the University of Paris but for the interference of 
Francis himself. As shameless an exercise of Henr/s own authority 
was required to wring an approval of his cause from Oxford and 
Cambridge. In Germany the very Protestants, in the fervour of their 
moral revival, were dead against the King. So far as could be seen 
from Cranmer's test every learned man in Christendom condemned 
Henry's cause. 

It was at the moment when every expedient had been exhausted by 
Norfolk and his fellow ministers that Cromwell came again to the 
front. Despair of other means drove Henry at last to adopt the 
bold plan from which he had shrunk at Wolsey's fall. The plan was 
simply that the King should disavow the Papal jurisdiction, declare 
himself Head of the Church within his realm, and obtain a divorce 
from his own Ecclesiastical Courts. But with Cromwell the divorce 
was but the prelude to a series of changes he was bent upon 
accomplishing. In all the chequered life of the new minister what 
had left its deepest stamp on him was Italy. Not only in the rapidity 
and ruthlessness of his designs, but in their larger scope, their clearer 
purpose, and their admirable combination, the Italian state-craft 
entered with Cromwell into English politics. He is, in fact, the first 
English minister in whom we can trace through the whole period of 
his rule the steady working out of a great and definite purpose. His 
purpose was to raise the King to absolute authority on the ruins 
of every rival power within the realm. It was not that Cromwell was 
a mere slave of tyranny. Whether we may trust the tale that 
carries him in his youth to Florence or no, his statesmanship was 
closely modelled on the ideal of the Florentine thinker whose book 
was constantly in his hand. Even as a servant of Wolsey he 
startled the future Cardinal, Reginald Pole, by bidding him take 
for his manual in politics the " Prince " of Machiavelli. Machiavelli 
hoped to find in Caesar Borgia, or in the later Lorenzo di Medici, 
a tyrant who after crushing all rival tyrannies might unite and regene- 
rate Italy ; and it is possible to see in the pohcy of Cromwell the aim 
of securing enlightenment and order for England by the concentration 
of all authority in the Crown. The one check on this royal absolutism 
which had^survived the Wars of the Roses lay in the wealth, the inde- 
pendent synods and jurisdiction, and the religious claims of the Church. ' 
To reduce the great ecclesiastical body to a mere department of the 
State, in which all authority should flow from the sovereign alone, and 
in which his will should be the only law, his decision the only test of 
truth, was a change hardly to be wrought without a struggle ; and it was 
the opportunity for such a struggle that Cromwell saw in the divorce. 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



X2Q 



His first blow was decisive. He had saved Wolsey from the charge 
of treason, but he now suffered him to fall under the penalties of 
Praemunire for his exercise of Papal jurisdiction, as Legate, within the 
land. The whole nation was declared to have been formally involved in 
the same charge by its acceptance of his authority, but the legal absurd- 
ity was redressed by a general pardon. From this pardon the clergy 
alone found themselves omitted. They were told that forgiveness could 
be bought at no less a price than the payment of a fine amounting to 
a million of our present money, and the acknowledgement of the King 
as " Protector and only supreme Head of the Church and Clergy 
of England." To the first demand they at once submitted ; against 
the second they struggled hard, but their appeals to Henry and to 
Cromwell met only with demands for instant obedience. The words 
were at last submitted by Warham to the Convocation. There was a 
o-eneral silence. "Whoever is silent seems to consent,'^ said the 
Archbishop. " Then are we all silent," replied a voice from among 
the crowd, and the assent was accepted. To every mind but Crom- 
well's the words seemed but a menace to the Pope, a threat which 
was backed by the demand for a settlement of the question ad- 
dressed to Clement on the part of the House of Lords. " The cause 
of his Majesty," the Peers were made to say, " is the cause of each 
of ourselves." If Clement would not confirm what was described as 
the judgment of the Universities "our condition will not be wholly 
irremediable. Extreme remedies are ever harsh of application, but he 
that is sick will by all means be rid of his distemper." The expul- 
sion of Catherine from the King's palace gave emphasis to the demand. 
But Cromwell still kept his hand on the troubled Churchmen. Con- 
vocation was made to propose the withdrawal of the payment of first- 
fruits to Rome on the promotion of bishops, and to petition that, should 
the Papacy resent such a step by a refusal to recognize the prelates 
who declined to pay them, then, "may it please your Highness to 
ordain in this present Parliament that the obedience of your Highness 
and of the people be withdrawn from the See of Rome." A bill to this 
effect was passed, but with a provision which suspended it as a menace 
over the Pope's head at the discretion of the Crown. Menaces, how- 
ever, fell unheeded on the Roman Court. While still suggesting a 
compromise as to the main point at issue, Clement boldly rebuked 
Henry for the indelicacy of his relations with Anne Boleyn, who had 
taken her rival's place in the King's palace ; and ordered him to restore 
Catherine, till the cause was tried, to her lawful position as Queen. 
By a brief which was posted on the church doors in Flanders, he 
inhibited him, on pain of excommunication, from seeking a divorce in 
his own English Courts, or from contracting a new marriage. Henry 
replied, not merely by a secret union with Anne Boleyn, but by the. 
Statute of Appeals, which forbade all further processes in the Court of. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Rome and annihilated, as far as his Enghsh subjects were concerned, 
the judicial jurisdiction of the Papacy. Cranmer, an active partisan of 
the divorce, was named on Warham's death to the See of Canterbury ; 
proceedings were at once commenced in his Court ; and the marriage 
of Catherine was formally declared invalid by the new Primate at 
Dunstable. A week later Cranmer set on the brow of Anne Boleyn 
the crown which she had so long coveted. 

As yet the real character of Cromwell's ecclesiastical policy had 
been disguised by its connexion with the divorce. But though 
formal negotiations continued between England and Rome, until 
Clement's final decision in Catherine's favour, they had no longer 
any influence on the series of measures which in their rapid suc- 
cession changed the whole character of the English Church. The 
acknowledgment of Henry's title as its Protector and Head was 
soon found by the clergy to have been more than a form of words. 
It was the first step in a policy by which the Church was to be 
prostrated at the foot of the throne. Convocation was forced to 
recognize the necessity of the Royal permission and assent for the 
validity of its proceedings and decisions. A new Act turned the 
bishops into mere nominees of the King. Their election by the 
chapters of their cathedral churches had long become formal, and 
their appointment had since the time of the Edwards been practically 
made by the Papacy on the nomination of the Crown. The privilege 
of free election was now with bitter irony left to the chapters, but 
they were compelled to receive the candidate chosen by the King 
on pain of prsemunire. This strange expedient has lasted till the 
present time ; but its character has wholly changed since the restora- 
tion of constitutional rule. The nomination of bishops has ever since 
the accession of the Georges passed from the King in person to the 
minister who represents the will of the people. Practically, therefore, 
an English prelate, alone among all the prelates of the world, is now 
raised to his episcopal throne by the same popular election which 
raised Ambrose to his episcopal chair at Milan. But at the moment, 
Cromwell's measure reduced the English bishops to absolute de- 
pendence on the Crown. Their dependence would have been complete 
had his policy been thoroughly carried out, and the royal power of 
deposition put in force as well as that of appointment. As it was, 
Henry could warn the Archbishop of DubHn that if he persevered in 
his " proud folly, we be able to remove you again and to put another 
man of more virtue and honesty in your place." Even Elizabeth in a 
burst of ill-humour threatened to " unfrock " the Bishop of Ely. By 
Cromwell's more ardent partizans this dependence of the bishops on the 
Crown was fully recognized. On the death of Henry the Eighth, Cran- 
mer took out a new commission from Edward for the exercise of his 
office. Latimer, when the Royal policy clashed with his belief, felt 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



531 



bound to resign the See of Worcester. That the power of deposition 
was at a later time quietly abandoned was due not so much to any 
deference for the religious instincts of the nation, but to the fact that 
the steady servility of the bishops rendered it absolutely unnecessary. 
When Convocation was once silenced, and the bishops fairly at Henry's 
feet the o-round was cleared for the great Statute by which the new 
character of the Church was defined. The Act of Supremacy ordered 
that the King " shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme 
Head in earth of the Church of England, and shall have and enjoy 
annexed and united to the Imperial Crown of this realm as well the 
title and style thereof as all the honours, jurisdictions, authorities, im- 
munities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity belonging, with 
full power to visit, repress, redress, reform, and amend all such errors, 
heresies, abuses, contempts, and enormities, which by any manner of 
spiritual authority or jurisdiction might or may lawfully be reformed." 
Authority in all matters ecclesiastical, as well as civil, was vested solely 
in the Crown. The '' courts spiritual " became as thoroughly the King's 
courts as the temporal courts at Westminster. Convocation could 
only deliberate by the Royal license, and its decisions were of no 
validity without the Royal assent. It was the Crown alone which 
could legally repress error or redress spiritual abuses. But the full 
m.eaning which Cromwell attached to the Supremacy was seen on 
his elevation to the new post of Vicar- General, or Vice-gerent of the 
King in all matters ecclesiastical. His first act -was to seize into the 
hands of the Crown the one means of speaking to the people at large 
which existed at that time. With the instinct of genius he dis- 
cerned the part which the pulpit was to play in the religious and 
political struggle which was at hand, and he resolved to turn it to 
the profit of the monarchy. The clergy learned by injunction after in- 
junction that they were regarded, and must learn to regard themselves, 
as mere mouth-pieces of the Royal will. The restriction of the right 
of preaching to priests who received licenses from the Crown silenced 
every voice of opposition. Even to those who received these licenses 
theological controversy was forbidden. The process of "tuning the 
pulpits " made them at every crisis the means of diffusing the Royal 
will. At the moment of Henry's last quarrel with Rome every bishop, 
abbot, and parish priest was required to preach against the usurpations 
of the Papacy and to proclaim the King as the Supreme Head of the 
Church. The very heads of the sermon were prescribed ; and the 
bishops were held responsible for the compliance of the clergy with 
these orders, as the sherifTs were held responsible for the compliance 
of the bishopSc It was only w^hen all possibility of resistance v/as at 
an end, when the Church was gagged and its pulpits turned into mere 
echoes of Henry's will, that Cromwell ventured on his last and crown- 
inc^ change, that of claiming for the Crown the right of dictatins^ at its 



Thomas 

Cromwell. 

1530- 

I540. 



332 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sbc. VI. I pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be held and taught through- 
out the land. A purified Catholicism such as Erasmus and Colet had 
dreamed of was now to be the religion of England. But the dream of the 
New Learning was to be wrought out, not by the progress of education 
and piety, but by the brute force of the New Monarchy. The Articles of 
Religion,, which Convocation received and adopted without venturing 
on a protest, were drawn up by the hand of Henry himself. The Bible 
and the three Creeds were laid down as the sole grounds of faith. 
The Sacraments were reduced from seven to three, only Penance being 
allowed to rank on an equality with Baptism and the Lord^s Supper. 
The assertion of the doctrines of Transubstantiation and Confession 
was compensated by the acknowledgment of Justification by Faith, 
a doctrine for which the friends. of the New Learning, such as Pole 
and Contarini, were struggling at Rome itself. The spirit of Erasmus 
was seen in the condemnation of purgatory, of pardons, and of masses 
for the dead, in the admission of prayers for the dead, and in the 
retention of the ceremonies of the Church without material change. 
Enormous as was the doctrinal revolution, not a murmur broke the 
assent of Convocation, and the Articles were sent by the Vicar-General 
into every county to be obeyed at men's peril. The plans of the New 
Learning were carried steadily out in the series of Royal Injunctions 
which followed. Pilgrimages were suppressed ; the excessive number 
of holy days diminished ; the worship of images and relics discouraged 
in words which seem almost copied from the protest of Erasmus. His 
burning appeal for a translation of the Bible which weavers might repeat 
at their shuttle, and ploughmen sing at their plough received at last a 
reply. The Bible was formally adopted as the basis of English faith. 
As a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten 
Commandments were at once translated into English, and ordered to 
be taught by every schoolmaster and father of a family to his children 
or pupils. In the outset of the ministry of Norfolk and More, the King 
had promised a new version of the Scriptures, but the work lagged 
for five years in the hands of the bishops till Miles Coverdale, a 
friend of Cranmer, was employed to collect and revise the translations 
of Tyndale, and the Bible which he edited appeared under the avowed 
patronage of Henry himself. The story of the Supremacy was graven 
on its very title-page. The new foundation of religious truth was to 
be regarded throughout England as a gift, not from the Church, but 
from the King. It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred 
volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to 
the throng of priests and laymen below. 

The temper of the New Learning was seen yet more clearly in 
Cromwell's attitude towards the monastic orders. In the early days 
of Erasmus popes and bishops had joined with princes and scholars 
in welcoming the diffusion of culture and the hopes of religious reform. 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



333 



But though an abhot or a prior here or there might be found among 
the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders, as a whole, 
repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only became more 
bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the in- 
solent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of dark- 
ness" and of the cloister. In England Colet and More echoed 
with greater reserve the scorn and invective of their friends. As an 
outlet for religious enthusiasm, indeed, monasticism was practically 
dead. The friar, now that his fervour of devotion and his intellectual 
energy had passed away, had sunk into the mere beggar. The monks 
had become mere landowners. Most of their houses were anxious 
only to enlarge their revenues and to diminish the number of those 
who shared them. In the general carelessness which prevailed as to 
the rehgious objects of their trust, in the wasteful management of their 
estates, in the indolence and self-indulgence which for the most part 
characterized them, the monastic houses simply exhibited the faults 
of all corporate bodies which have outlived the work which they were 
created to perform. But they were no more unpopular than such 
corporate bodies generally are. The Lollard cry for their suppression 
had died away. In the north, where some of the greatest abbeys 
were situated, the monks were on good terms with the country gentry, 
and their houses served as schools for their children ; nor is there any 
sign of a different feeling elsewhere. But in Cromwell's system there 
was no room for either the virtues or the vices of monasticism, for its 
indolence and superstition, or for its independence both of the episco- 
pate and the throne. While the changes we have narrated were 
going on, two Royal Commissioners, Legh and Leyton, had been 
despatched on a general visitation of the religious houses, and their 
reports formed a " Black Book " which was laid before Parliament 
on their return. It was acknowledged that about a third of the 
religious houses, including the bulk of the larger abbeys, were fairly 
and decently conducted. The rest were charged with drunkenness, 
with simony, and with the foulest and most revolting crimes. The 
character of the visitors, the sweeping nature of their report, and the 
long debate which followed on its reception, leaves little doubt that 
the charges were grossly exaggerated, but there is no ground for 
believing them to have been wholly untrue. The want of any effective 
discipline, which had resulted from their exemption from any but 
Papal supervision, told fatally against monastic morahty, even in 
abbeys like St, Alban's ; and the acknowledgment of Warham, as 
well as the partial measure of suppression begun by Wolsey, go far to 
prove that in the smaller houses, at least, indolence had passed into 
crime. But in spite of the cry of "Down with them'^ which broke 
from the Commons as the report was read, the country was still far 
from desiring the utter downfall of the monastic system. A long and 



Sec. VI. 

Thomas 

Cromwell. 

1530- 

1540. 



334 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



bitter debate was followed by a compromise which suppressed all 
houses whose income fellbelow^20o a year, and granted their revenues 
to the Crown ; but the great abbeys were still preserved intact. 

The debate on the suppression of the Monasteries was the first 
instance of opposition with which Cromwell had met, and for some 
time longer it was to remain the only one. While the great revolution 
which struck down the Church was in progress, England simply held 
her breath. It is only through the stray depositions of Royal spies 
that we catch a glimpse of the wrath and hate which lay seething 
under this terrible silence of a whole people. For the silence was 
a silence of terror. Before Cromwell's rise and after his fall from 
power the reign of Henry the Eighth witnessed no more than the 
common tyranny and bloodshed of the time. But the years of 
Cromwell's administration form the one period in our history which 
deserves the name which men have given to the rule of Robespierre. 
It was the English Terror. It was by terror that Cromwell mastered 
the King ; it was by terror that he mastered the people. Cranmer 
could plead for him at a later time with Henry as " one whose surety 
was only by your Majesty, who loved your Majesty, as I ever thought, 
no less than God." But the attitude of Cromwell towards the King 
was something more than that of absolute dependence and unques- 
tioning devotion. He was " so vigilant to preserve your Majesty from 
all treasons," adds the Primate, " that few could be so secretly conceived 
but he detected the same from the beginning." Henry, like every 
Tudor, was fearless of open danger, but tremulously sensitive to the 
lightest breath of hidden disloyalty. It was on this inner dread that 
Cromwell based the fabric of his power. He was hardly secre- 
tary before a host of spies were scattered broadcast over the land. 
Thousands of secret denunciations poured into the open ear of the 
minister. The air was soon thick with tales of plots and conspira- 
cies, and with the detection and suppression of each Cromwell 
tightened his hold on the King. With Henry to back him he could 
strike boldly at England itself The same terror which had mastered 
the King was employed to master the people. Men felt in England — 
to use the figure by which Erasmus paints the time — " as if a scorpion 
lay sleeping under every stone." The confessional had no secrets for 
Cromwell. Men's talk with their closest friends found its way to his 
ear. " Words idly spoken," the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the rav- 
ings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at 
his fall, " tortured into treason." The only chance of safety lay in 
silence. ^^ Friends who used to write and send me presents,^' Erasmus 
tells us, "now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any 
one, and this through fear." But even the refuge of silence was 
closed by a law more infamous than any that has ever blotted the 
Statute-book of England. Not only was thought made treason, but. 



VL] 



THE NEW MONARCHY, 



335 



men were forced to reveal their thoughts on pain of their very silence 
being punished with the penalties of treason. All trust in the older 
bulwarks of liberty was destroyed by a policy as daring as it w^as un- 
scrupulous. The noblest institutions were degraded into instruments 
of terror. Though Wolsey had strained the law to the utmost he had 
made no open attack on the freedom oi justice. If he had shrunk 
from assembling Parliaments it was from his sense that they were the 
bulwarks of liberty. Under Cromwell the coercion of juries and the man- 
agement of judges rendered justice the mere mouth-piece of the royal 
will : and where even this shadow of justice proved an obstacle to blood- 
shed, Parliament was brought into play to pass bill after bill of attain- 
der. "He shall be judged by the bloody laws he has himself made," 
was the cry of the Council at the moment of his fall, and by a singular re- 
tribution the crowning injustice which he sought to introduce even into 
the practice of attainder, the condemnation of a man without hearing 
his defence, was only practised on himself. But ruthless as was the 
Terror of Cromwell it was of a nobler type than the Terror of France. 
He never struck uselessly or capriciously, or stooped to the meaner 
victims of the Guillotine. His blows were effective just because he 
chose his victims from among the noblest and the best. If he struck 
at the Church it was through the Carthusians, the holiest and the 
most renowned of English Churchmen. If he struck at the baronage 
it was through Lady Salisbur}^, in whose veins flowed the blood of 
kings. If he struck at the New Learning it was through the murder of 
Sir Thomas More. But no personal vindictiveness mingled with his 
crime. In temper indeed, so far as we can judge from the few stories 
which lingered among his friends, he was a generous, kindly-hearted 
man, with pleasant and winning manners which atoned for a certain 
av/kwardness of person, and with a constancy of friendship which 
won him a host of devoted adherents. But no touch either of love 
or hate swayed him from his course. The student of Machiavelli had 
.lOt studied the " Prince " in vain. He had reduced bloodshed to a 
system. Fragments of his papers still show us with what a business- 
like brevity he ticked off human lives among the casual " remem- 
brances '' of the day. " Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down 
to be tried and executed at Reading." " Item, to know the King^s 
pleasure touching Master More/^ " Item, when Master Fisher shall 
go to his execution, and the other." It is indeed this utter absence 
of all passion, of all personal feeling, that makes the figure of Crom- 
v/ell the most terrible in our history. He has an absolute faith in the 
end he is pursuing, and he simply hews his w^ay to it as a woodman 
hews his way through the forest, axe in hand. 

The choice of his first victim showed the ruthless precision with 
which Cromwell was to strike. In the general opinion of Europe the 
foremost Englishman of his time was Sir Thom^as More. As the 



Sec. VI. 

Thomas 

Cromwell. 

1530. 

1540. 



The 

Death of 

More. 



33^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



policy of the divorce ended in an open rupture with Rome he had 
withdrawn silently from the ministry, but his silent disapproval was 
more telling than the opposition of obscurer foes. To Cromwell there 
must have been something specially galling in Morels attitude of 
reserve. The religious reforms of the New Learning were being 
rapidly carried out, but it was plain that the man who represented 
the very life of the New Learning believed that the sacrifice of liberty 
and justice was too dear a price to pay even for religious reform. 
More was believed to regard the divorce and re-marriage as religiously 
invalid, though his faith in the power of Parliament to regulate the 
succession made him regard the children of Anne Boleyn as the legal 
heirs of the Crown. CromwelFs ingenuity framed an Act of Succession 
which not only sanctioned the re-marriage but called on all who took 
the oath of allegiance to declare their belief in the religious validity of 
the divorce. The Act was no sooner passed than a Royal mandate 
bade More repair to Lambeth, to the house where he had bandied fun 
with Warham and Erasmus, or bent over the easel of Holbein. The 
summons was, as he knew, simply a summons to death, and for a 
moment there may have been some passing impulse to yield. But it 
was soon over. " I thank the Lord,'^ More said, with a sudden start, as 
the boat dropped silently down the river from his garden steps at 
Chelsea in the early morning ; " I thank the Lord that the field is 
won." Cranmer and his fellow commissioners tendered to him the 
new oath of allegiance ; but, as they expected, it was refused. They 
bade him walk in the garden that he might reconsider his reply. The 
day was hot, and More seated himself in a window from which 
he could look down into the crowded court. Even in the presence 
of death, the strange sympathy of his nature could enjoy the humour 
and life of the throng below. " I saw," he said afterwards, " Master 
Latimer very merry in the court, for he laughed and took one or 
twain by the neck so handsomely that if they had been women 
I should have weened that he waxed wanton." The crowd below was 
chiefly of priests, rectors and vicars, pressing to take the oath that 
More found harder than death. He bore them no grudge for it. When 
he heard the voice of one who was known to have boggled hard at 
the oath a little while before calhng loudly and ostentatiously for drink, 
he only noted him with his peculiar humour. "He drank," More 
supposed, " either from dryness or from gladness " or " quod ille notus 
erat Pontifici." He was called in again at last, but only repeated his 
refusal. It was in vain that Cranmer phed him with distinctions 
which perplexed even the subtle wit of the ex-chancellor ; he remained 
unshaken and passed to the Tower. For the moment even Cromwell 
shrank from his blood. More remained a prisoner, while new victims 
were chosen to overawe the silent but widely spread opposition to the 
bill of Supremacy. In the general relaxation of the religious life the 



VI.] 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



337 



charity and devotion of the brethren of the Charter-house had won the 
reverence even of those who condemned monasticism. After a stubborn 
resistance they had acknowledged the Royal Supremacy, and taken the 
oath of submission prescribed by the Act. But by an infamous con- 
struction of the statute which made the denial of the Supremacy 
treason, the refusal of satisfactory answers to official questions as to a 
conscientious belief in it was held to be equivalent to open denial. 
The aim of the new measure was well known, and the brethren pre- 
pared to die. In the agony of waiting, enthusiasm brought its 
imaginative consolations ; *^ when the Host was lifted up there came 
as it were a whisper of air which breathed upon our faces as we 
knelt ; and there came a sweet soft sound of music." They had not 
long, however, to wait. Their refusal to answer was the signal for 
their doom. Seven swung from the gallows ; the rest were flung into 
Newgate, chained to posts in a noisome dungeon where, " tied and 
not able to stir," they were left to perish of gaol-fever and starvation. 
In a fortnight five were dead and the rest at the point of death, 
** almost dispatched," CromwelFs envoy wrote to him, " by the hand of 
God, of which,, considering their behaviour, I am not sorry." The 
interval of imprisonment had failed to break the resolution of More, and 
the same means sufficed to bring him to the block. A mock trial 
was hardly necessary for his condemnation, or for that of Fisher, the 
most learned among the prelates who had favoured the New Learning, 
and who had been imprisoned on the same charge in the Tower. 
The old Bishop approached the block with a book of the New 
Testament in his hand. He opened it at a venture ere he knelt, and 
read "this is life eternal to know Thee, the only true God." Fisher^s 
death was soon followed by that of More. On the eve of the fatal 
blow he moved his beard carefully from the block. " Pity that should 
be cut," he was heard to mutter with a touch of the old sad irony, 
" that has never committed treason." 

But it required, as- Cromwell well knew, heavier blows even than 
these to break the stubborn resistance of Englishmen to his projects 
of change, and he seized his opportunity in the Revolt of the North. 
In the north the monks had been popular ; and the outrages with 
which the dissolution of the smaller abbeys had been accompanied 
had stirred the blood of the nobles, who were already writhing beneath 
the rule of one whom they looked upon as a low-born upstart. "The 
world will never mend," Lord Hussey was heard to say, " till we fight for 
it." Agrarian discontent and the love of the old religion united in a 
revolt which broke out in Lincolnshire. The rising was hardly sup- 
pressed when Yorkshire was in arms. From every parish the farmers 
marched with the parish priest at their head upon York, and the 
surrender of the city determined the waverers. In a few days Skipton 
Castle, where the Earl of Cumberland held out with a handful of 

z 



Sec. VI. 

Thomas 

Cromwell. 

1530- 

1540. 



Crom- 
well 
and the 
Nobles. 



153^- 



338 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



servants, was the only spot north of the Humber which remained true to 
the King. Durham rose at the call of Lords Latimer and Westmore- 
land. Though the Earl of Northumberland feigned sickness, the Percies 
joined the revolt. Lord Dacre, the chief of the Yorkshire nobles, 
surrendered Pomfret, and was at once acknowledged as their chief by 
the insurgents. The whole nobility of the north were now in arms, 
and thirty thousand " tall men and well horsed " moved on the Don 
demanding the reversal of the Royal policy, a reunion with Rome, the 
restoration of Catherine's daughter, Mary, to her rights as heiress of 
the Crown, redress for the wrongs done to the Church, and above all 
the fall of Cromwell. Though their advance was checked by negotia- 
tion, the organization of the revolt went steadily on throughout the 
winter, and a Parliament of the North gathered at Pomfret, and 
formally adopted the demands of the insurgents. Only six thousand 
men under Norfolk barred their way southward, and the Midland 
counties were known to be disaffected. Cromwell, however, re- 
mained undaunted by the peril. He suffered Norfolk to negotiate ; 
and allowed Henry, under pressure from his Council, to promise 
pardon and a free Parliament at York, a pledge which Norfolk and 
Dacre alike construed into an acceptance of the demands made by 
the insurgents. Their leaders at once flung aside the badge of the 
Five Wounds which they had worn, with a cry " We will wear no badge 
but that of our Lord the King,'' and nobles and farmers dispersed 
to their homes in triumph. But the towns of the north were no 
sooner garrisoned, and Norfolk's army in the heart of Yorkshire, 
than the veil was flung aside. A few isolated outbreaks gave a 
pretext for the withdrawal of every concession. The arrest of the 
leaders of the ^^ Pilgrimage of Grace," as the insurrection was styled, 
was followed by ruthless severities. The country was covered 
with gibbets. Whole districts were given up to military execution. 
But it was on the nobles that Cromwell's hand fell heaviest. It was 
only in the north and in the west that any of the old feudal force 
lingered among them, and he seized his opportunity for dealing at it 
a last and fatal blow. " Cromwell," Darcy broke fiercely out as he 
stood at the Council board, " it is thou that art the very special and 
chief cause of all this rebellion and wickedness, and dost daily 
travail to bring us to our ends and strike off our heads. I trust that 
ere thou die, though thou wouldst procure all the noblest heads 
within the realm to be stricken off, yet there shall one head remain 
that shall strike off thy head." But the warning was unheeded. 
Lord Darcy, who stood at the head of the nobles of Yorkshire, and 
Lord Hussey, who stood at the head of the nobles of Lincolnshire, 
went alike to the block. The Abbot of Barlings, who had ridden into 
Lincoln with his canons in full armour, swung with his brother Abbot 
• of Kirkstead from the gallows. The Abbots of Fountains and of 



VI.I 



THE NEW MONARCHY. 



339 



Jervaulx were hanged at Tyburn side by side with the representative 
of the great hne of Percy. Lady Bulmer was burnt at the stake. Sir 
Robert Constable was hanged in chains before the gate of Hull. The 
blow to the north had hardly been dealt when Cromwell turned to deal 
with the west, the-one other quarter where feudalism still retained its 
vigour. The two houses of the Courtenays and the Poles, linked 
to each other by close intermarriages, stood first in descent among 
the English nobles. Margaret Plantagenet, the Countess of Salisbury, 
a daughter of the Duke of Clarence by the heiress of the Earl of 
Warwick, was at once representative of the Nevilles and a niece 
of Edward the Fourth. Her third son, Reginald Pole, after refusing 
the highest offers from Henry as the price of his approval of the 
divorce, had taken refuge in Rome, where he had been raised to the 
Cardinalate. He was now preparing an attack on the King in his 
book '' On the Unity of the Church.^' " There may be found ways 
enough in Italy," Cromwell wrote to him in significant words, "to 
rid a treacherous subject. When Justice can take no peace by pro- 
cess of law at home, sometimes she may be enforced to take new 
means abroad." But he had left hostages in Henry's hands. " Pity 
that the folly of one witless fool should be the ruin of so great a family. 
Let him follow ambition as fast as he can, these that little have 
offended (saving that he is of their kin) were it not for the great 
mercy and benignity of the prince, should and might feel what it 
is to have such a traitor to their kinsman." Pole answered by the 
publication of his book, and by an appeal to the Emperor to exe- 
cute the Bull of DepQsition which was now launched by the Papacy. 
Cromwell was quick with his reply. Courtenay, the Marquis of 
Exeter, was a kinsman of the Poles, and like them of royal blood, a 
grandson through his mother of Edward the Fourth. His influence 
over the west was second only to the hold which the Duke of Norfolk 
had upon the eastern counties. His discontent at CromwelFs system 
broke out in words of defiance. " Knaves rule about the King," 
Exeter is reported to have said, '^ I trust to give them a buffet one 
day." He was at once arrested with Lord Montague, Pole's elder 
brother, as accomplices of the Cardinal, and both were beheaded on 
Tower Hill. After a brief interval the grey hairs of Lady Salisbury 
lay dabbled with blood upon the same fatal block. 



Thomas 

Cromwelu 

1530- 

1540. 



2 2 



340 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CHAP; 



CHAPTER VIL 



THE REFORMATION. 

Section. I^— The Protestants. 1540—1553. 

[Authorities. — The main authority for the History of the early Protestants, 
as of the Marian persecution, is Foxe's **Book of Martyrs/' In spite of end- 
less errors, of Puritan prejudices and deliberate suppressions of the truth (many 
of which will be found corrected by Dr. Maitland's " Essays on the Reforma- 
tion,''), its mass of facts and wonderful charm of style will always give a great 
importance to the work of Foxe. The whole story of the early Protestants has 
been admirably wrought up by Mr. Froude (''History of England," chap vi.). 
For the close of Henry's reign and for that of Edward, we have a mass of 
material in Strype's ** Memorials," and his '* Life of Cranmer," in Mr. 
Pocock's edition of ''Burnet's History of the Reformation," in Hay ward's 
Life of Edward, and Edward's own Journal, in Holinshed's "Chronicle," 
and Machyn's "Diary" (Camden Society) which continues through the reign 
of Mary. Much light has been thrown from the unpublished State Papers 
on this period by Mr. Froude ("History of England" vols. iv. and v.) whose 
work after the death of Henr} the Eighth becomes of greater historic value.] 



With the death of Lord Exeter and Lady Salisbury the New 
Monarchy reached the height of its power. The old English liberties 
lay prostrate at the feet of the King. The Lords were powerless, the 
House of Commons filled with the creatures of the Court, and de- 
graded into the mere engine of tyranny. Royal proclamations were 
taking the place of parliamentary legislation, benevolences were en- 
croaching more and more on the right of parliamentary taxation, 
Justice was prostituted in the ordinary courts to the royal will, while 
the boundless and arbitrary powers of the Royal Council were gradu- 
ally superseding the slower processes of the Common Law. The new 
religious changes had thrown an almost sacred character over the 
"majesty" of the King. Henry was the Head of the Church. From 
the primate to the meanest deacon every minister of it derived from 
him his sole right to exercise spiritual powers. The voice of its 
preachers was the mere echo of his will. He alone could define 
orthodoxy or declare heresy. The forms of its worship and belief 
were changed and rechanged at the royal caprice. Half of its wealth 
went to swell the royal treasury, and the other half lay at the 
King's mercy. It was this unpredecented concentration of all power 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



341 



in the hands of a single man that overawed the imagination of 
Henr/s subjects. He was regarded as something high above the 
laws which govern common men. The voices of statesmen and of 
priests extolled his wisdom and power as more than human. The 
Parliament itself rose and bowed to the vacant throne when his name 
was mentioned. An absolute devotion to his person replaced the 
old loyalty to the law. When the Primate of the English Church 
described the chief merit of Cromwell, it was by asserting that he 
loved the King " no less than he loved God." 

It was indeed Cromwell, as we have seen, who, more than any man, 
had reared this fabric of king-worship ; but he had hardly reared it 
before it began to give way. In three cardinal points the success of 
his measures brought about the ruin of his policy. One of its most 
striking features had been his revival of Parliaments. The great 
assembly which the New Monarchy, from Edward the Fourth to 
Wolsey, had dreaded and silenced, was boldly called to the front again 
by Cromwell ; and turned into the most formidable weapon of the royal 
will. The suppression of the mitred Abbots, and a large creation of 
new peerages in favour of Court favourites and dependants, left the 
House of Lords yet more helpless against the Crown than of old. The 
House of Commons was crowded with members nominated by the 
Royal Council. With such Houses Cromwell had no difficulty in 
making the nation itself, whether it would or no, an accomphce in the 
work of absolutism. It was by Parliamentary statutes that the Church 
was destroyed, and freedom gagged with new treasons and oaths and 
questionings. It was by bills of attainder promoted in Parliament 
that the great nobles were brought to the block. But the success of 
such a system depended wholly on the absolute servility of Parliament 
to the will of the Crown. On one occasion during CromwelFs own 
rule a "great debate" had shewn that elements of resistance still 
survived, elements which we shall see developing rapidly as the terror 
passes away, and as the power of the Crown declines under the 
minority of Edward and the unpopularity of Mary. As in the modern 
instance of Hungary, the part which the Parliament was to play in 
the period which followed CromwelFs fall shows the importance of 
clinging to the forms of constitutional freedom, even when their life 
seems lost. In the inevitable reaction against tyranny they afford 
centres for the reviving energies of the people. It is of hardly less 
importance that the tide of liberty, when it again returns, is enabled 
through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along its tra- 
ditional channels^ And to this revival of a spirit of independence 
Henry largely contributed in the spoliation of the Church and the 
dissolution of the monasteries. Partly from necessity, partly from 
a desire to create a large party interested in the maintenance of their 
. ecclesiastical policy, Cromwell and the King squandered the vast mass 



The Pro- 
testants. 
1540- 
1553. 



342 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



of wealth which flowed into the Treasury with reckless prodigality. 
Something like a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was in this way 
transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry. 
Not only were the older houses enriched, but a new aristocracy was 
erected from among the dependants of the Court. The Russells, Caven- 
dishes, and Fitzwilliams are familiar instances of families which rose 
from obscurity through the enormous grants of Church-land made to 
Henry's courtiers. The old baronage was hardly crushed before a new 
aristocracy took its place. " Those families within or without the bounds 
of the peerage," observes Mr. Hallam, " who are now deemed the most 
considerable, will be found, with no great number of exceptions, to have 
first become conspicuous under the Tudor line of kings, and if we could 
trace the title of their estates, to have acquired no small portion of 
them mediately or immediately from monastic or other ecclesiastical 
foundations." The leading part which the new peers took in the 
events which followed Henry's death gave a fresh strength and vigour 
to the whole order. But the smaller gentry shared in the general 
enrichment of the landed proprietors, and the new energy of the. 
Lords was soon followed by a display of fresh political independence 
among the Commons themselves. 

But it was above all in the new energy^ which the religious spirit of 
the people at large drew from the ecclesiastical changes which he had 
brought about, that the policy of Cromwell was fatal to the New 
Monarchy. Lollardism, as a great social and popular movement, 
had ctased with the suppression of Cobham's revolt, and little re- 
mained of the directly religious impulse given by Wyclif beyond a 
vague restlessness and discontent with the system of the Church. But 
weak and fitful as was the life of Lollardism, the prosecutions whose 
records lie so profusely scattered over the bishop's registers failed 
wholly to kill it. We see groups meeting here and there to read " in 
a great book of heresy all one night certain chapters of the Evange- 
lists in English," while transcripts of Wyclif's tracts passed from 
hand to hand. The smouldering embers needed but a breath to fan 
them into flame, and the breath came from William Tyndale. A 
young scholar from Oxford, he was drawn from his retirement in 
Gloucestershire by the news of Luther's protest at Wittenberg, and 
after a brief stay in London we find him on his way to the httle 
town which had suddenly became the sacred city of the Reformation, 
Students of all nations were flocking there with an enthusiasm which 
resembled that of the Crusades. "As they came in sight of the town," 
a contemporary tells us, " they returned thanks to God with clasped 
hands, for from Wittenberg as heretofore from Jerusalem the light of 
evangehcal truth hath spread to the utmost parts of the earth." It 
was at Luther's instance that Tyndale translated there the Gospels and 
Epistles ; and the press which he established at Antwerp, where he 



VII.l 



THE REFORM A TION. 



343 



was joined by a few scholars from Cambridge, was soon busy with his 
versions of the Scriptm'es, and with reprints of the tracts of WycHf 
and of Luther. These were smuggled over to England and circulated 
among the poorer and trading classes through the agency of an associa- 
tion of " Christian Brethren," consisting principally of London trades- 
men and citizens, but whose missionaries spread over the country at 
large. They found their way at once to the Universities, where the 
intellectual impulse given by the New Learning was quickening reli- 
gious speculation. Cambridge had already won a name for heresy, 
and the Cambridge scholars whom Wolsey introduced into Cardinal 
College spread the contagion through Oxford. Tyndale himself was 
an instance of their influence. The group of " Brethren '' which was 
formed in Cardinal College for the secret reading and discussion of 
the Epistles soon included the more intelligent and learned scholars 
of the University. It was in vain that Clark, the centre of this group, 
strove to dissuade fresh members from joining it by w^arnings of the 
impending dangers. " I fell down on my knees at his feet,'' says 
one of them, Anthony Dalaber, ^' and with tears and sighs besought 
him that for the tender mercy of God he should not refuse m^e, saying 
that I trusted verily that He who had begun this on me would not 
forsake me, but would give me grace to continue therein to the end. 
When he heard me say so he came to me, took me in his arms, and 
kissed me, saying, ' The Lord God Almighty grant you so to do, and 
from henceforth ever take me for your father, and I will take you for 
my son m Christ.' " The rapid diffusion of Tyndale's works, and 
their vehement attacks on the bishops and the Church, roused Wolsey 
at last to action. At Oxford the " Brethren" were thrown into prison 
and their books seized ; in London a pile of Testaments was burned 
in St. PauFs Churchyard, and a few heretics recanted before the 
Cardinal in its nave. But in spite of the panic of the Protestants, 
w^ho fled in crowds over sea, little severity was really exercised ; and 
it was not till Wolsey's fall that forbearance was thrown aside. 

The anxiety both of the Cardinal and the King lest in the outburst 
against heresy the reformers of the New Learning should suffer harm., 
was remarkably shown in the protection they extended to one who 
was destined to eclipse even the fame of Colet as a popular preacher. 
Hugh Latimer was the son of a Leicestershire yeoman, whose armour 
the boy had buckled on ere he set out to meet the Cornish insurgents 
at Blackheath field. He has himself described the soldierly training 
of his youth. " My father was delighted to teach me to shoot with the 
bow. He taught me how to draw, how to lay my body to the bow, 
not to draw with strength of arm as other nations do but with the 
strength of the body." At fourteen he was at Cambridge, flinging 
himself into the New Learning which was winning its way there, Avith 
a zeal which at last led him to study in Italy itself. The ardour of his ^ 



344 



HISTORY OF THE EIVGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



mental efforts left its mark on him in ailments and enfeebled health, 
from which, vigorous as he was, his frame never wholly freed itself. 
But he was destined to be known, not as a scholar, but as a preacher. 
The sturdy good sense of the man shook off the pedantry of the 
schools as well as the subtlety of the theologian in his addresses from 
the pulpit. He had little turn for speculation, and in the religious 
changes of the day we find him constantly lagging behind his brother 
reformers. But he had the moral earnestness of a Jewish prophet, 
and his denunciations of wrong had a prophetic directness and 
fire. "Have pity on your soul," he cried to Henry, "and think that 
the day is even at hand when you shall give an account of your 
office, and of the blood that hath been shed by your sword." His 
irony was yet more telling than his invective. "I would ask you a 
strange question," he said once at PauFs Cross to a ring of Bishops, 
"who is the most diligent prelate in all England, that passeth all the 
rest in doing of his office? I will tell you. It is the Devil ! of all 
the pack of them that have cure, the Devil shall go for my money ; 
for he ordereth his business. Therefore, you unpreaching prelates, 
learn of the Devil to be diligent in your office. If you will not learn 
of God, for shame learn of the Devil." But he is far from limiting 
himself to invective. His homely humour breaks in with story and 
apologue ; his earnestness is always tempered with good sense ; his 
plain and simple style quickens with a shrewd mother-wit. He talks 
to his hearers as a man talks to his friends, telling stories such as we 
have given of, his own life at home, or chatting about the changes and 
chances of the day with a transparent simplicity and truth that raises 
even his chat into grandeur. His theme is always the actual world 
about him, and in his homely lessons of loyalty, of industry, of pity 
for the poor, he touches upon almost every subject, from the plough 
to the throne. No such preaching had been heard in England before 
his day, and with the growth of his fame grew the danger of perse- 
cution. There were moments when, bold as he was, Latimer's heart 
failed him. " If J had not trust that God will help me," he wrote 
once, " I think the ocean sea would have divided my lord of London 
and me by this day." A citation for heresy at last brought the danger 
home. " I intend," he wrote with his peculiar medley of humour and 
pathos, " to make merry with my parishioners this Christmas, for all 
the sorrow, lest perchance I may never return to them again." But 
he was saved throughout by the steady protection of the Court. 
Wolsey upheld him against the threats of the Bishop of Ely ; Henry 
made him his own chaplain ; and the King's interposition at this 
critical moment forced Latimer's judges to content themselves with 
a few vague words of submission. 

Henry's quarrel with Rome soon snatched the Protestants from 
the keener persecution which troubled them after Wolsey's fall. The 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



345 



divorce, the renunciation of the Papacy, the degradation of the clergy, 
the suppression of the monasteries, the rehgious changes, fell like a 
series of heavy blows upon the priesthood. From persecutors they 
suddenly sank into men trembling for their very lives. Those 
whom they had threatened were placed at their head, Shaxton, a 
favourer of the new changes, was raised to the see of Salisbury ; 
Barlow, a yet more extreme partizan, to that of St. David's. Latimer 
himself became Bishop of Worcester, and in a vehement address to 
the clergy in Convocation taunted them with their greed and super- 
stition in the past, and with their inactivity when the King and his 
Parhament were labouring for the revival of religion. The- aim of 
Cromwell, as we have seen, was simply that of the New Learning ; he 
desired religious reform rather than revolution, a simplification 
rather than change of doctrine, the purification of worship rather than 
the introduction of a new ritual. But it was impossible for him to 
strike blow after blow at the Church without leaning instinctively to 
the party who sympathized with the German reformation, and were 
longing for a more radical change at home. The Protestants, as 
these were called, appealed to him against the Bishops' Courts, and 
looked for their security to the "rattling letters'' from the Vicar- 
General, which damped the zeal of their opponents. Few as they 
still were in numbers, their new hopes made them a formidable force ; 
and in the school of persecution they had learnt a violence which 
iehghted in outrages on the faith which had so long trampled them 
under foot. At the very outset of Cromwell's changes four Suffolk 
ooys broke into the church at Doverscourt, tore down a wonder- 
vorking crucifix, and burned it in the fields. The suppression of the 
esser monasteries was the signal for a new outburst of ribald insult 
the old religion. The roughness, insolence, and extortion of the 
Commissioners sent to effect it drove the whole monastic body to 
despair. Their servants rode along the road with copes for doublets, 
and tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among the larger 
houses which were left. Some sold their jewels and relics to provide 
for the evil day they saw approaching. Some begged of their own 
will for dissolution. It was worse when. fresh ordinances of the Vicar- 
General ordered the removal of objects of superstitious veneration. 
The removal, bitter enough to those whose religion twined itself 
around the image or the relic which was taken away, was yet more 
embittered by the insults with which it was accompanied. The 
miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed its head and stirred its eyes, 
was paraded from market to market and exhibited as a juggle before 
the Court. Images of the Virgin were stripped of their costly vest- 
ments and sent to be publicly burnt at London. Latimer forwarded 
to the capital the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out of his 
cathedral church at Worcester, with rough words of scorn : "She, 



Sec. I. 

The Pro- 
testants. 
1540- 
1553. 

Crom- 
■well and 
the Pro- 
testants. 

1536- 



346 



mSTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



with her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and 
their two other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly 
muster at Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling all relics 
from their reliquaries, and to level every shrine with the ground. 
The bones of St. Thomas of Canterbury were torn from the stately 
shrine which had been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his 
name erased from the service books as that of a traitor. The in- 
troduction of the English Bible into churches gave a new opening for 
the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of Royal injunctions that 
it should be read decently and without comment, the young zealots of 
the party prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited 
hearers during the service of mass, and accompanied their reading 
with violent expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English 
primer to church with them, and studied it ostentatiously during 
matins. Insult passed into open violence when the Bishops' Courts 
were invaded and broken up by Protestant mobs ; and law and 
public opinion were outraged at once, when priests who favoured the 
new doctrines began openly to bring home Avives to their vicarages. ; ; 
A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the silence of|| 
the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of complaint, ' 
were "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse." 
The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church roused a 
furious controversy. Above all, the Sacrament of the Mass, the centre 
of the Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still remained 
sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility and 
profaneness which passes behef. The doctrine of Transubstantiation, 
which was as yet recognised by law, was held up to scorn in ballads and 
mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his 
hands when the priest elevated the Host. The most sacred words of 
the old worship, the words of consecration, " Hoc est corpus,'^ were 
travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as " Hocus-pocus." It was 
by this attack on the Mass, even more than by the other outrages, that 
the temper both of Henry and the nation was stirred to a deep resent- 
ment ; and the first signs of reaction were seen in the Law of the Six 
Articles, which was passed by the Parliament with almost universal 
assent. On the doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was re-asserted 
by the first of these, there was no difference of feeling or belief between 
the men of the New Learning and the older Catholics. But the road 
to a further instalment of even moderate reform seemed closed by the 
five other articles which sanctioned communion in one kind, the 
celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and auricular 
confession. A more terrible feature of the reaction was the revival 
of persecution. Burning was denounced as the penalty for a denial of 
transubstantiation ; it was only on a second offence that it became the 
penalty for an infraction of the other five doctrines. A refusal to 



VII.] 



THE reformatio:^. 



confess or to attend Mass was made felony. It was in vain that 
Cranmer, with the five bishops who partially sympathized with the 
Protestants, struggled against the bill in the Lords : the Commons were 
" all of one opinion," and Henry himself acted as spokesman on the 
side of the Articles. But, zealous as he was for order, Henry was still 
true in heart to the cause of a moderate reform ; and Cromwell, though 
he had bent to the storm, was quick to profit by the vehemence of the 
Catholic reaction. In London alone five hundred Protestants were in- 
dicted under the new act. Latimer and Shaxton were imprisoned, and 
the former forced into a resignation of his see. Cranmer himself was 
only saved by Henry's personal favour. But the first burst of triumph 
had no sooner spent itself than the strong hand of Cromwell was again 
felt by the Cathohc zealots. The bishops were quietly released. The 
London indictments were quashed. The magistrates were roughly 
checked in their enforcement of the law, while a general pardon cleared 
the prisons of the heretics who had been arrested under its provisions. 
A few months after its enactment we find, from a Protestant letter, 
that persecution had wholly ceased, " the Word is powerfully preached 
and books of every kind may safely be exposed for sale.'' 

Never indeed had Cromwell shown such greatness as in his last 
struggle against Fate. "Beknaved'^ by the King whose confidence 
in him was hourly waning, and met by a growing opposition in the 
Council as his favour declined, the temper of the man remained indo- 
mitable as ever. He stood absolutely alone. Wolsey, hated as he 
had been by the nobles, had been supported by the Church ; but 
Churchmen hated Cromwell with an even fiercer hate than the nobles 
themselves. His only friends were the Protestants, and their friend- 
ship was more fatal than the hatred of his foes. But he shewed no 
signs of fear or of halting in the course he had entered on. His 
activity was as boundless as ever. Like Wolsey he had concen- 
trated in his hands the whole administration of the state ; he was 
at once foreign minister and home minister and Vicar-General of 
the Church, the creator of a new fleet, the organizer of armies, the 
president of the terrible Star Chamber. But his Italian indifference 
to the mere show of power contrasted strongly with the pomp of 
the Cardinal. His personal habits were simple and unostentatious. 
If he clutched at money it v/as to feed the vast army of spies whom 
he maintained at his own expense, and whose work he surveyed 
with a sleepless vigilance. More than fifty volumes still remain of 
the gigantic mass of his correspondence. Thousands of letters from 
" poor bedesmen," from outraged wives and v/ronged labourers and 
persecuted heretics, flowed in to the all-powerful minister, whose system 
of personal government had turned him into the universal court of 
appeal. So long as Henry supported him, however reluctantly, he 
was more than a match, even single-handed, for his foes. He met 



Sec. I. 

The Peo- 

testants. 

1540- 

1553. 



The Fall 
of Crom- 
well, 



348 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the hostility of the nobles with a threat which marked his power. 
'* If the Lords would handle him so, he would give them such a 
breakfast as never was made in England, and that the proudest of 
them should know." He was strong enough to expel the Bishop of 
Winchester, Gardiner, who had become his chief opponent, from 
the Royal Council. His single will forced on a scheme of foreign 
policy, whose aim was to bind England to the cause of the Reforma- 
tion, while it bound Henry helplessly to his minister. The daring 
boast which his enemies laid afterwards to his charge, whether uttered 
or not, is but the expression of his policy. " In brief time he would 
bring things to such a pass that the King with all his power should? j 
not be able to hinder him." His plans rested, like the plan which '^ 
proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master. The short 
lived royalty of Anne Boleyn had ended in charges of adultery and 
treason, and in her death on Tower Hill. Her rival and successor in 
Henry's affections, Jane Seymour, had just died in child-birth ; and 
Cromwell replaced her with, a German consort, Anne of Cleves, the 
sister-in-law of the Lutheran elector of Saxony. He dared even to 
resist Henry's caprice, when the King revolted on their first interview 
at the coarse features and unwieldy form of his new bride. For the 
moment Cromwell had brought matters " to such a pass " that it was 
impossible to recoil from the marriage. But the marriage of Anne of 
Cleves was but the first step in a policy which, had it been carried out 
as he designed it, would have anticipated the triumphs of Richelieu. 
Charles and the House of Austria could alone bring about a Catholic 
reaction strong enough to arrest and roll back the Reformation ; and 
Cromwell was no sooner united with the princes of North Germany 
than he sought to league them with France for the overthrow of the 
Emperor. Had he succeeded, the whole face of Europe would have 
been changed. Southern Germany would have been secured for Pro- 
testantism, and the Thirty Years War averted. He failed as men fail 
who stand ahead of their age. The German princes shrunk from a 
contest with the Emperor, France from a struggle which would be 
fatal to Catholicism ; and Henry, left alone to bear the resentment 
of the House of Austria, and chained to a wife he loathed, turned 
savagely on Cromwell. The nobles sprang on him with a fierceness 
that told of their long-hoarded hate. Taunts and execrations burst 
from the Lords at the Council table, as the Duke of Norfolk, who 
had been charged with the minister's arrest, tore the ensign of the 
Garter insolently from his neck. At the charge of treason Cromwell 
flung his cap on the ground with a passionate cry of despair. " This 
then," he exclaimed, " is my guerdon for the services I have done ! 
On your consciences, I ask you, am I a traitor?" Then with a 
sudden sense that all was over he bade his foes "make quick work, 
and not leave me to languish in prison." 



VII.] 



THE RE FORM A TION, 



349 



Quick work was made, and a yet louder burst of popular applause 
than that which hailed the attainder of Cromwell, hailed his execution. 
For the moment his designs seemed to be utterly abandoned. The 
marriage with Anne of Cleves was annulled, and a new Queen found in 
Catherine Howard, a girl of the house of Norfolk. Norfolk himself, 
who stood, as before Cromwell's rise, at the head of affairs, resumed 
the policy which Cromwell had interrupted. With the older nobles 
generally, he still clung to the dream of the New Learning, to a purifi- 
cation of the Church through a general Council, and to the recon- 
ciliation of England with the purified body of Catholicism. For 
such a purpose it was necessary to vindicate English orthodoxy ; and 
to ally England with the Emperor, by whose influence alone the 
assembly of such a Council could be brought about. Norfolk and his 
master remained true to the principles of the earher reform. The 
reading of the Bible was still permitted, though its disorderly expo- 
sitions were put down. The publication of an English Litany fur- 
nished the germ of the national Prayer Book of a later time. The 
greater Abbeys, which had been saved by the energetic resistance of 
the Parliament from Cromwell's grasp, were now involved in the same 
ruin with the smaller. There was no thought of reviving the old 
superstitions, or undoing the work which had been done, but simply 
of guarding the purified faith against Lutheran heresy. It was for this 
purpose that the Six Articles were once more put in force, and a 
Committee of State named to guard against the progress of heresy ; 
while the friendship of England was offered to Charles, when the 
struggle between France and the House of Austria burst again for 
a time into flame. But, as Cromwell had foreseen, the time for 
a peaceful reform and for a general reunion of Christendom was past. 
The Council, so passionately desired, met at Trent in no spirit of 
conciliation, but to ratify the very superstitions and errors against 
which the New Learning had protested, and which England and 
Germany had flung away. The long hostility of France and the 
House of Austria merged in the greater struggle which was opening 
between Catholicism and the Reformation. The Emperor, from whom 
Norfolk looked for a purification of the Church, established the 
Inquisition in Flanders. As their hopes of a middle course faded, 
the Catholic nobles themselves drifted unconsciously with the tide 
of reaction. The persecution of the Protestants took a new vigour. 
Anne Ascue, a lady of the Court, was tortured and burnt for her denial 
of Transubstantiation. Latimer was seized ; and Cranmer himself, 
who in the general dissolution of the moderate party was drifting 
towards Protestantism as Norfolk was drifting towards Rome, was for 
a moment in danger. But at the last hours of his life Henry proved 
himself true to the work he had begun. His resolve not to return to 
the obedience of Rome threw him, whether he would or no, back on 



The Pro- 
testants. 
1540- 
1553. 



350 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the policy of the great minister whom he had hurried to the block. 
He offered to unite in a " League Christian^' with the German Princes. 
He suddenly consented to the change, suggested by Cranmer, of the 
Mass into a Communion Service. He flung the Duke of Norfolk into 
the Tower as a traitor, sent his son, the Earl of Surrey, to the block, 
and placed the Earl of Hertford, who was known as a patron of the 
Protestants, at the head of the Council of Regency which he nomi- 
nated at his death. 

Catherine Howard atoned like Anne Boleyn for her unchastity by 
a traitor's death ; her successor on the throne, Catherine Parr, had 
the luck to outlive the King. But of Henry's numerous marriages 
only three children survived ; Mary and Elizabeth, the daughters of 
Catherine of Arragon and of Anne Boleyn, and Edward, the boy who 
now ascended the throne as Edward the Sixth, his son by Jane 
Seymour. The will of Henry had placed Jane's brother, whom he 
had raised to the peerage as Lord Hertford, and who at a later time 
assumed the title of Duke of Somerset, at the head of a Council of* 
Regency in which the adherents of the old and new system were 
carefully balanced ; but his first act was to expel the former from 
the Council, and to seize the whole Royal power with the title of 
Protector. Hertford's personal weakness forced him at once to seek 
for popular support by measures which marked the first retreat of 
the New Monarchy from the position of pure absolutism which it had 
reached under Henry. A fatal Statute, which at the close of the 
late reign had given to Royal proclamations the force of law, was 
repealed. The new felonies and treasons, which Cromwell had 
created and used with so terrible an effect, were erased from the 
Statute Book. The hope of support from the Protestants united with 
Hertford's personal predilections in his patronage of the innovations 
against which Henry had battled to the last. Cranmer, as we have 
seen, had drifted into a purely Protestant position ; and his open 
break with the older system followed quickly on Hertford's rise to 
power. " This year," says a contemporary, " the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury did eat meat openly in Lent in the Hall of Lambeth, the like of 
which was never seen since England was a Christian country." This 
significant act was followed by a rapid succession of sweeping 
changes. The legal prohibitions of Lollardry were removed ; the 
Six Articles were repealed ; a Royal injunction removed all pictures 
and images from the churches ; priests were permitted to marry ; 
the new Communion which had taken the place of the Mass was 
ordered to be administered in both kinds, and in the English tongue ; 
an Enghsh book of Common Prayer, the Liturgy, which with slight 
alterations is still used in the Church of England, replaced the 
Missal and Breviary from which its contents are mainly drawn ; a 
new Catechism embodied the doctrines of Cranmer and his friends ; 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION, 



351 



and a Book of Homilies compiled in the same sense was appointed to 
be read in churches. These sweeping religious changes were carried 
through with the despotism, if not with the vigour, of Cromwell. Gar- 
diner, who in his servile acceptance of the personal supremacy of the 
sovereign denounced all ecclesiastical changes made during the King's 
minority as illegal and invalid, was sent to the Tower. The power of 
ig was restricted by the issue of licences only to the friends of 
mate. While all counter arguments were rigidly suppressed, a 
)f Protestant pamphleteers flooded the country with vehement 
/es against the Mass and its superstitious accompaniments. The 
of the nobles about the court was won by the suppression of 
ries and religious gilds, and by glutting their greed with the last 
of the Church. German and Italian mercenaries were intro- 
, to stamp out the wider popular discontent which broke out in 
(st, in the west, and in the midland counties. The Cornishmen 
i to receive the new service "because it is like a Christmas 
' Devonshire demanded in open revolt the restoration of the 
and the Six Articles. The agrarian discontent woke again in 
neral disorder. Twenty thousand men gathered round the '^ oak 
formation ^^ near Norwich, and repulsing the Royal troops in a 
rate engagement, renewed the old cries for a removal of evil 
ellors, a prohibition of enclosures, and redress for the grievances 
i poor. 

^olt was everywhere stamped out in blood ; but the weakness 
1 the Protector had shown in presence of the danger, and the 
:ion caused by the sanction he had given to the agrarian 
.nds of the insurgents, ended in his fall. He was forced by his 
party to resign, and his power passed to the Earl of Warwick, 
hose ruthless severity the suppression of the revolt was mainly 
The change of governors, however, brought about no change of 
m. The rule of the upstart nobles who formed the Council of 
ncy became simply a rule of terror. " The greater part of 
people," one of their creatures, Cecil, avowed, '' is not in 
ir of defending this cause, but of aiding its adversaries, the 
.:er part of the nobles who absent themselves from Court, all 
bishops save three or four, almost all the judges and lawyers, 
)St all the justices of the peace, the priests who can move their 
:s any way, for the whole of the commonalty is in such a state 
rritation that it will easily follow any stir towards change." 
with their triumph over the revolt, Cranmer and his colleagues 
meed yet more boldly in the career of innovation. Four pre- 
; who adhered to the older system were deprived of their sees 
committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower. A crowning 
mce was given to the doctrine of the Mass by an order to 
lolish the stone altars, and replace them by wooden tables, which 



352 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



were stationed for the most part in the middle of the church. The 
new Prayer-book was revised, and every change made in it leant 
directly towards the extreme Protestantism which was at this time 
finding a home at Geneva. The Forty-two Articles of Religion, which 
were now introduced, though since reduced by omissions to thirty- 
nine, have remained to this day the formal standard of doctrine in the 
English Church. The sufferings of the Protestants had failed to. 
teach them the worth of religious liberty ; and a new code of eccle- 
siastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a board of 
Commissioners as a substitute for the Canon Law of the Catholic 
Church, although it shrank from the penalty of death, attached that 
of perpetual imprisonment or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, 
and adultery, and declared excommunication to involve a severance 
of the offender from the mercy of God, and his deliverance into the 
tyranny of the devil. Delays in the completion of this Code pre- 
vented its legal establishment during Edward^s reign (it was quietly 
dropped by Elizabeth), but the use of the new Liturgy and atten- 
dance at the new service was enforced by imprisonment, and sub- 
scription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by Royal authority 
from all clergymen, churchwardens, and schoolmasters. The distaste 
for changes so hurried, and so rigorously enforced, was increased 
by the daring speculations of the more extreme Protestants. The ■ 
real value of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century to 
mankind lay, not in its substitution of one creed for another, but in 
the new spirit of inquiry, the new freedom of thought and of dis- 
cussion, which was awakened during the process of change. But 
however familiar such a truth may be to us, it was absolutely hidden 
from the England of the time. Men heard with horror th^t the 
foundations of faith and morality were questioned, polygamy advo- 
cated, oaths denounced as unlawful, community of goods raised into 
a sacred obligation, the very Godhead of the Founder of Christianity 
denied. The repeal of the Statute of Heresy left the powers of 
the Common Law intact, and Cranmer availed himself of these to 
send heretics of the last class without mercy to the stake; but 
within the Church itself the Primate's desire for uniformity was roughly 
resisted by the more ardent members of his own party. Hooper, 
who had been named Bishop of Gloucester, refused to wear the 
episcopal habits, and denounced them as the livery of the " harlot 
of Babylon," a name for the Papacy which was supposed to have 
been discovered in the Apocalypse. Ecclesiastical order was almost 
at an end. Priests flung aside the surplice as superstitious. Patrons 
of livings presented their huntsmen or game keepers to the benefices 
in their gift, and pocketed the stipend. All teaching of divinity 
ceased at the Universities : the students indeed had fallen off in 
numbers, the libraries were in part scattered or burnt, the intellectual 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



353 



impulse of the New Learning had died away. One noble measure 
indeed, the foundation of eighteen Grammar Schools, was destined 
to throw a lustre over the name of Edward, but it had no time to 
bear fruit in his reign. All that men saw was religious and political 
chaos, in which ecclesiastical order had perished, and in which politics 
were dying down into the squabbles of a knot of nobles over the 
spoils of the Church and the Crown. The plunder of the chauntries 
and the gilds failed to glut the appetite of the crew of spoilers. 
Half the lands of every see were flung to them in vain ; the see of 
Durham had been wholly suppressed to satisfy their greed ; and the 
whole endowments of the Church were now threatened with confisca- 
tion. But while the courtiers gorged themselves with manors, the 
Treasury grew poorer. The coinage was debased. Crown lands to 
the value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away 
to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The Royal expenditure had 
mounted in seventeen years to more than four times its previous total. 
It is clear that England must soon have risen against the misrule of 
the Protectorate, if the Protectorate had not fallen by the intestine 
divisions of the plunderers themselves. 

Section II.— The Martyrs. 1553—1558. 

\^Authorities, — As before.] 



The waning health of Edward warned Warwick, who had now be- 
com^e Duke of Northumberland, of an unlooked-for danger. Maiy, the 
daughter of Catherine of Aragon, who had been placed next in the 
succession to Edward by her father's will, remained firm amidst 
all the changes of the time to the older faith ; and her accession 
threatened to be the signal for its return. But the bigotry of the 
young King was easily brought to consent to a daring scheme by 
which her rights might be set aside. Edward's "plan," as Northum- 
berland dictated it, annulled the will of his father ; though the rio-ht of 
determining the succession had been entrusted to Henry by a Statute 
of the Realm. It set aside both Mary and Elizabeth, who stood next 
in the will, as bastards. With this exclusion of the direct line of Henr}^ 
the Eighth the succession would vest, if the rules of hereditary descent 
were observed, in the descendants of his elder sister Margaret ; who 
had become by her first husband, James the Fourth of Scotland, the 
grandmother of the young Scottish Queen, Mary Stuart; and, by 
a second marriage with the Earl of Angus, was the grandmother 
of Henry Lennox, Lord Darnley. Margaret's descendants, however, 
were regarded as incapacitated by their exclusion from mention in 
Henry's will. The descendants of her sister Mary, the younger 

A A 



354 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



daughter of Henry the Seventh, by her marriage with Brandon, 
Duke of Suffolk, had been placed by the late King next in suc- 
cession to his own children : and Mary^s child Frances was still 
living, the mother of three daughters by her marriage with Lord 
Grey, who had been raised to the Dukedom of Suffolk. Frances 
however was passed over, and Edward's "plan" named her eldest 
child Jane as his successor. The marriage of Jane Grey with Guildford 
Dudley, the fourth son of Northumberland, was all that was needed 
to complete the unscrupulous plot. The consent of the judges 
and council to her succession was extorted by the violence of the 
Puke, and the new sovereign was proclaimed on Edward's death. 
But the temper of the whole people rebelled against so lawless a 
usurpation. The eastern counties rose as one man to support Mary ; 
and when Northumberland marched from London with ten thousand 
at his back to crush the rising, the Londoners, Protestant as they 
were, showed their ill-will by a stubborn silence. " The people crowd 
to look upon us," the Duke noted gloomily, "but not one calls 
'Godspeed ye.'^' His courage suddenly gave way, and his retreat 
to Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland 
himself threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen 
Mary. But his submission failed to avert his doom ; and the death of 
Northumberland drew with it the imprisonment in the Tower of the 
innocent and hapless girl, whom he had made the tool of his ambition. 
The whole system which had been pursued during Edward's reign fell 
with a sudden crash. London alone remained true to Protestantism. 
Over ail the rest of the country the tide of reaction swept without a 
check. The married priests were driven from their churches ; the 
new Prayer-book was set aside ; the Mass was restored with a burst of 
popular enthusiasm. The imprisoned bishops found themselves again 
in their sees ; and Latimer and Cranmer, who were charged with a 
share in the usurpation, took their places in the Tower. But with the 
restoration of the system of Henry the Eighth the popular impulse 
was satisfied. The people had no more sympathy with Mary's leanings 
towards Rome than with the violence of the Protestants. The Parlia- 
ment, while eager to restore the Mass and the laws against heresy, 
clung obstinately to the Church-lands and to the Royal Supremacy. 
Nor was England more favourable to the marriage on which, from 
motives both of policy and religious zeal, Mary had set her heart. The 
Emperor had ceased to be the object of hope or confidence as a 
mediator who would at once purify the Church from abuses and restore 
the unity of Christendom : he had ranged himself definitely on the 
side of the Papacy and of the Council of Trent ; and the cruelties of 
the Inquisition, which he introduced into Flanders, gave a terrible in- 
dication of the bigotry which he was to bequeath to his house. The 
marriage with his son PhiMp, whose hand he offered to his cousin 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



355 



Mary, meant an absolute submission to the Papacy, and the undoing 
not only of the Protestant reformation, but of the more moderate 
reforms of the New Learning. On the other hand, it offered the 
political advantage of securing Mary's throne against the pretensions 
of the young Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart, who had become formidable 
by her marriage with the heir of the French crown ; and whose 
adherents already alleged the illegitimate birth of both Mary and 
Elizabeth, through the annulling of their mothers' marriages, as a 
ground for denying their right of succession. To the issue of the 
marriage he proposed, Charles promised the heritage of the Low 
Countries, while he accepted the demand made by Mary's minister. 
Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, of complete independence both of 
policy and action on the part of England, in case of such a union. 
The temptation was great, and Mary's passion overleapt all obstacles. 
But in spite of the toleration which she had promised, and had as 
yet observed, the announcement of her design drove the Protestants 
into a panic of despair. The Duke of Suffolk suddenly appeared 
at Leicester, and proclaimed his daughter Queen ; but the rising 
proved a failure. The danger was far more formidable when the 
dread that Spaniards were coming "to conquer the realm" roused 
Kent into revolt under Sir Thomas Wyatt, the bravest and most 
accomplished Englishman of his day. The ships in the Thames 
submitted to be seized by the insurgents. The trainbands of London, 
who marched under the Duke of Norfolk against them, deserted to 
the rebels in a mass with shouts of ''' a Wyatt ! a Wyatt ! we are all 
Enghshmen !'' Had the insurgents moved quickly on the capital, its 
gates would at once have been flung open, and success would have 
been assured. But in the critical moment Mary was saved by her 
queenly courage. Riding boldly to the Guildhall she appealed, with 
"a man's voice," to the loyalty of the citizens, and when Wyatt 
appeared on the Southwark bank the bridge was secured. The issue 
hung on the question, which side London would take ; and the insur- 
gent leader pushed desperately up the Thames, seized the bridge 
at Kingston, threw his force across the river, and marched rapidly 
back on the capital. The night mxarch along miry roads wearied and 
disorganized his men, the bulk of whom were cut off from their leader 
by a Royal force which had gathered in the fields at what is nov/ 
Hyde Park Corner, but Wyatt himself, with a handful of followers, 
pushed desperately on to Temple Bar. " I have kept touch," he cried 
as he sank exhausted at the gate; but it was closed, and his adherents 
within were powerless to effect their promised diversion in his favour. 

The courage of the Queen, who had refused to iiy even while the 
rebels were marching beneath her palace walls, was only equalled by 
her terrible revenge. The hour was come when the Protestants were 
at her feet, and she struck without mercy. Lady Jane, her father, and 

A A 2 



The Sub- 
mission 
to Home 



356 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap-;. 



her uncles atoned for the ambition of the House of Suffolk by the 
death of traitors. Wyatt and his chief adherents followed them to 
the block, while the bodies of the poorer insurgents were dangling on 
gibbets throughout Kent. Elizabeth, who had with some reason been 
suspected of complicity in the insurrection, was sent to the Tower ; and 
only saved from death by the interposition of the Emperor and of the 
Council. But the failure of the revolt not only crushed the Protes- 
tant party, it secured the marriage on which Mary was resolved. 
She used it to wring a reluctant consent from the Parliament, and 
meeting Philip at Winchester in the ensuing summer became his wife. 
The temporizing measures to which the Queen had been forced by 
the earlier difficulties of her reign could now be laid safely aside. Mary 
was resolved to bring about a submission to Rome ; and her minis- 
ter Gardiner, who, as the moderate party which had supported the 
policy of Henry the Eighth saw its hopes disappear, ranged himself 
definitely on the side of a unity which could now only be brought 
about by reconciliation with the Papacy on its own terms, was, if 
less religiously zealous, politically as resolute as herself. The Spanish 
match was hardly concluded, when the negotiations with Rome were 
brought to a final issue. The attainder of Reginald Pole, who had 
been appointed by the Pope to receive the submission of the realm, 
was reversed ; and the Legate, who entered London by the river with 
his cross gleaming from the prow of his barge, was solemnly welcomed 
in full Parliament. The two Houses decided by a formal vote to 
return to the obedience of the Papal See, and received on their 
knees the absolution which freed the realm from the guilt incurred 
by its schism and heresy. But, even in the hour of her triumph, 
the temper both of Parliament and the nation warned the Queen of 
the failure of her hope to bind England to the purely Catholic 
policy of Spain. The growing independence of the two Houses 
was seen in their rejection of measure after measure proposed by 
the Crown. In spite of Mar/s hatred of Elizabeth, they refused to 
change the order of succession in favour of Philip. Though their 
great Bill of Reconciliation repealed the whole ecclesiastical legislation 
of Henry the Eighth and his successor, they rejected all proposals for 
the restoration of Church-Ian Js to the clergy. It was to no purpose 
that the old statute for the burning of heretics, together with a bill 
for the restoration of the jurisdiction of the bishops, was again in- 
troduced into Parliament. Nor was the temper of the nation at^ 
large less decided. The sullen discontent of London compelled its! 
bishop, Bonner, to withdraw the inquisitorial articles by which he" 
hoped to purge his diocese of heresy. Even the Royal Council was 
divided, and in the very interests of Catholicism the Emperor himself 
counselled prudence and delay. But whether from without or from 
within, warning was wasted on the fierce bigotry of the Queen. 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



357 



It was a moment when the prospects of the party of reform seemed 
utterly hopeless. Spain had taken openly the lead in the great 
Catholic movement, and England was being dragged, however reluc- 
tantly, by the Spanish marriage into the current of reaction. Its 
opponents were broken by the failure of their revolt, and unpopular 
through the memory of their violence and greed. But the cause 
which prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour of persecution. 
If the Protestants had not known how to govern, they knew how to 
die. The story of Rowland Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, tells us 
more of the work which was now begun, and of the effect it v/as likely 
to produce, than pages of historic dissertation. Although Parliament 
had refused to enact the Statute of Heresy, it was still possible to 
fall back on the powers of the Common Law ; and Gardiner, at the 
head of the Council, pressed busily on the work of death. Taylor, 
who as a man of mark had been one of the first victims chosen for 
execution, was arrested in London and condemned to suffer in his 
own parish. His wife, " suspecting that her husband should that 
night be carried away," had waited through the darkness with her 
children in the porch of St. Botolph's beside Aldgate. '^ Now when the 
sheriff his company came against St. Botolph's Church, Ehzabeth 
cried, saying, ^ O my dear father ! Mother ! mother ! here is my father 
led away ! ' Then cried his wife, ^ Rowland, Rowland, where art 
thou 1 ' — for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the 
other. Dr. Taylor answered, * I am here, dear wife,' and stayed. The 
sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, ' Stay a 
little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came 
she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and 
his wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's prayer. At 
which sight the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the 
company. After they had prayed he rose up and kissed his wife and 
shook her by the hand, and said, * Farewell, my dear wife, be of good 
comfort, for I am quiet in my conscience ! God shall still be a father 
to my children.' . . . Then said his wife, * God be with thee, dear 
Rowland ! I will, with God's grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.' . . . All 
the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that accounted 
himself going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal. . . . Coming 
within two miles of Hadleigh he desired to light off his horse, which 
done he leaped and set a frisk or twain as men commonly do for 
dancing. ; *Why, master Doctor,' quoth the Sheriff, 'how do you 
now ? ' He answered, ' Well, God be praised. Master Sheriff, never 
better ; for now I know I am almost at home. I lack not past two 
stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's house ! ' . . . The 
streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with men and women of 
the town and country who waited to see him ; whom when they beheld 
so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable voices, they cried, 



35^^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



* Ah, good Lord ! there goeth our good shepherd from us ! ' " The journey 
was at last over. " * What place is this/ he asked, * and what meaneth it 
that so much people are gathered together?' It was answered, * It is 
Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the people are 
come to look upon you.' Then said he, ' Thanked be God, I am even 
at home !'.... But when the people saw his reverend and ancient 
face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and 
cried, saying ' God save thee, good Dr. Taylor ; God strengthen thee 
and help thee ; the Holy Ghost comfort thee ! ' He wished, but was 
not suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and 
kissed it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for 
him to stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, 
with his hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so 
let himself be burned." One of the executioners " cruelly cast a fagot 
at him, which hit upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran 
down his visage. Then said Dr. Taylor, * O friend, I have harm enough 

what needed that V " One more act of brutality brought his sufferings 
to an end. — " So stood he still without either crying or moving, with his 
hands folded together, till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the 
head that the brains fell out, and the dead corpse fell down into the 
fire." 

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, 
the Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in 
which the Council sate, its victims were generally delivered for 
execution, but who, in spite of the nickname and hatred which his 
official prominence in the work of death earned him, seems to have 
been naturally a good-humoured and merciful man, asked a youth 
who was brought before him whether he thought he could bear 
the fire. The boy at once held his hand without flinching in the 
flame of a candle which stood by. Rogers, a fellow-worker with 
Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of the foremost 
among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in the flame 
*^ as if it had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives gleamed 
for a moment into poetry at the stake. " Pray for me," a boy, William 
Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked of 
the bystanders round. " I will pray no more for thee," one of them 
replied, " than I will pray for a dog." ** ^ Then,' said William, ^ Son of 
God, shine upon me ; ' and immediately the sun in the elements shone 
out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to 
look another way ; whereat the people mused, because it was so dark 
a httle time before." The work of terror failed in the very ends for 
which it was wrought. The panic, which had driven a host of 
Protestants over sea to find refuge at Strasburg or Geneva, soon passed 
away. The old spirit of insolent defiance, of outrageous violence. 
, was roused again at the challenge of persecution. A Protestant hung a 



VII.] 



THE REFORM A TION. 



3S9 



string of puddings round a priest's neck in derision of his beads. 
The restored images were grossly insulted. The old scurrilous 
ballads were heard again in the streets. One miserable wretch, 
driven to frenzy, stabbed the priest of St. Margaret's as he stood with 
the chalice in his hand. It was a more formidable sign of the times 
that acts of violence such as these no longer stirred the people at 
large to their former resentment. The horror of the persecution left 
no room for other feelings. Every death at the stake won hundreds 
to the cause of its victims. "You have lost the hearts of twenty 
thousands that were rank Papists/' ran a letter to Bonner, "within 
these twelve months.^' Bonner indeed, never very zealous in the 
cause, was sick of his work. Gardiner was dead, and the energy of 
the bishops quietly relaxed. But Mary had no thought of hesitation 
in the cause she had begun. " Rattling letters " from the Queen 
roused the lagging prelates to fresh persecution, and in three months 
fifty victims were hurried to their doom. It was resolved to bring 
the chiefs of the Protestant party to the stake. Two prelates had 
already perished ; Hooper, the Bishop of Glocester, had been burnt 
in his own Cathedral city ; Ferrars, the Bishop of St. David's, had 
suffered at Caermarthen. Latimer and Bishop Ridley of London 
were now drawn from their prisons at Oxford. " Play the man, 
Master Ridley," cried the old preacher of the Reformation p.s the 
flames shot up around him ; " we shall this day light such a candle, by 
God's gi'ace, in England as I trust shall never be put out." One 
victim remained, far beneath many who had preceded him in 
character, but high above them in his position in the Church of 
England. The other prelates who had suffered had been created 
after the separation from Rome, and were hardly regarded as bishops 
by their opponents. But, whatever had been his part in the schism, 
Cranmer had received his Pallium from the Pope. He was, in the 
eyes of all, Archbishop of Canterbury, the successor of St. Augustine 
and of St. Thomas in the second see of Western Christendom. To 
burn the Primate of the English Church for heresy was to shut out 
meaner victims from all hope of escape. But revenge and religious 
zeal alike urged Mary to bring Cranmer to the stake. First among 
the many decisions in which the Archbishop had prostituted justice 
to Henry's will stood that by which he had annulled the King's 
marriage with Catherine and declared Mary a bastard. The last of 
his political acts had been to join, whether reluctantly or no, in the 
shameless plot to exclude Mary from the throne. His great posi- 
tion, too, made him more than any man the representative of the 
religious revolution which had passed over the land. His figure 
stood with those of Henry and of Cromwell on the frontispiece of the 
English Bible. The decisive change which had been given to the 
character of the Reformation under Edward was due wholly to 



36o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CHAir'. 



Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard and still hear in the 
accents of the English Liturgy, which he compiled in the quiet 
retirement of Otford. As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested 
with no meaner tribunal than that of Rome, and his execution was 
necessarily delayed. But the courage which he had shown since 
the accession of Mary gave way the moment his final sentence was 
announced. The moral cowardice, which had displayed itself in his 
miserable compliance with the lust and despotism of Henry, displayed 
itself again in the six recantations by which he hoped to purchase 
pardon. But pardon was impossible ; and Cranmer's strangely mingled 
nature found a power in its very weakness when he was brought mto 
the church of St. Mary to repeat his recantation on the way to the 
stake. " Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before 
him, " now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience 
more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that 
is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth ; which here I 
now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand contrary to 
the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to 
save my life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand offended in 
writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first 
punished ; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first burnt." " This 
was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, " there- 
fore it shall suffer first punishment ;" and holding it steadily in the flame 
" he never stirred nor cried " till life was gone. 

It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among 
a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of 
his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to 
Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of 
Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were thousands 
who felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of 
Latimer could reach only hearts as bold as his own ; but the sad 
pathos of the Primate's humiliation and repentance struck choids of 
sympathy and pity in the hearts of all. It is from that moment that 
we may trace the bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause 
of Rome ; which, however partial and unjust it must seem to an his- 
toric observer, still lies graven deep in the temper of the English people. 
The failure of any attempt to make England really useful to the 
CathoUc cause became clear even to the bigoted Philip ; and on the 
disappearance of all hope of a child, he left the country, in spite of 
Mary's passionate entreaties, never to return. But the wretched 
Queen struggled desperately on. In the face of the Parliament's refusal 
to restore the confiscated Church-lands, she did her best to undo Henry's 
work. She refounded all she could of the abbeys which had been 
suppressed. She refused the first-fruits of the clergy. Above all, she 
pressed on the work of persecution. It had sunk now from bishops 



VII.] 



THE REFORM A TION, 



361 



and priests to the people itself. The sufferers were sent in batches to 
the flames. In a single day thirteen victims, two of them women, 
were burnt at Stratford-le-Bow. Seventy-three Protestants of Col- 
chester were dragged through the streets of London, tied to a single 
rope. A new commission for the suppression of heresy was exempted 
by royal authority from all restrictions of law which fettered its 
activity. The Universities were visited ; and the corpses of the foreign 
teachers who had found a resting place there under Edward — Bucer, 
Fagius, and Peter Martyr — were torn from their graves and reduced^ 
to ashes. The penalties of martial law were threatened against the 
possessors of heretical books issued from Geneva ; the treasonable 
contents of which indeed, and their constant exhortations to rebellion 
and civil war, justly called for stern repression. But the loyalty which 
had seated Mary on the throne was fast dying away ; and petty insur- 
rections showed the revulsion of popular feehng. Open sympathy 
began to be shown to the sufferers for conscience' sake. In the three 
years of the persecution three hundred victims had perished at the 
stake. The people sickened at the work of death. The crowd round 
the fire at Smithfield shouted " Amen " to the prayer of seven martyrs 
whom Bonner had condemned, and prayed in its turn, that " God 
would strengthen them." Disease and famine quickened the general 
discontent which was roused when, in spite of the pledges given at 
her marriage, Mary dragged England into a war to support Philip — 
who on the Emperor's resignation had succeeded to his dominions of 
Spain, Flanders, and the New World — in a struggle against France. 
The war had hardly begun when, with characteristic secrecy and 
energy, the Duke of Guise flung himself upon Calais, and compelled it 
to surrender before succour could arrive. " The brightest jewel in the 
English crown," as all then held it to be, was suddenly reft away ; 
and the surrender of Guisnes, which soon followed, left England 
without a foot of land on the Continent. But so profound was the 
discontent that even this blow failed to rally the country round the 
Queen. The forced loan to which she resorted came in slowly. The 
levies mutinied and dispersed. The death of Mary alone averted 
a general revolt, and a burst of enthusiastic joy hailed the accession 
of Ehzabeth, 



Section III.— Elizabeth. 1558— 1560. 

^Authorities, — Camden's '*Life of Elizabeth." For the ecclesiastical questions 
of this period, Strype's ** Annals of the Reformation," his '*Life of Parker," 
and the ** Zurich Letters," published by the Parker Society, are of primary 
importance. Cardinal Granvelle's correspondence illustrates the policy of 
Spain, and M. Teulet has published a valuable series of French despatches. 
The ** Burleigh Papers" (with which compare Nares's cumbrous **Life of 



362 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Lord Burleigh") and, above all, the State Papers now being calendared 
for the Master of the Rolls throw a new light on Elizabeth's own policy. 
Mr. Fronde's account of her reign (vols. vii. to xii.) is of high value, and his 
extracts from State Papers of Cecil and the documents at Simancas have 
cleared up many of its greatest difficulties.] 



Never had the fortunes of England sunk to a lower ebb than at the 
moment when Elizabeth mounted the throne. The country was 
humiliated by defeat^ and brought to the verge of rebellion by the 
bloodshed and misgovernment of Mary's reign. The old social dis- 
content, trampled down for a time by the mercenary troops of Somerset, 
still remained a perpetual menace to public order. The religious strife 
had passed beyond hope of reconciliation, now that the Reforme) s 
were parted from their opponents by the fires of Smithfield, and the 
party of the New Learning all but dissolved. The Catholics were 
bound helplessly to Rome. Protestantism, burnt at home and hurled 
into exile abroad, had become a fiercer thing ; and was pouring back 
from Geneva with dreams of revolutionary change in Church and State. 
England^ dragged at the heels of Phihp into a useless and ruinous 
war, was left without an ally save Spain ; while France, mistress of 
Calais, became mistress of the Channel. Not only was Scotland 
a standing danger in the north, through the French marriage of 
Mary Stuart and its consequent bondage to French policy; but its 
Queen had assumed the style and arms of an English sovereign, and 
threatened to rouse every Catholic throughout the realm against 
Elizabeth's title. In presence of this host of dangers the country lay 
utterly helpless, without army or fleet, or the means of manning one ; 
for the treasury, already drained by the waste of Edward's reign, Imd 
been utterly exhausted by Mary's restoration of the Church-lands, and 
by the cost of her war with France. 

England's one hope lay in the character of her Queen. Elizabeth 
was now in her twenty-fifth year. Personally she had much of her 
mother's beauty ; her figure was commanding, her face long, but 
queenly and intelligent, her eyes quick and fine. She had grown up 
amidst the liberal culture of Henry's Court a bold horsewoman, a 
good shot, a gracefiil dancer, a skilled musician, and an accomplished 
scholar. She read eveiy morning a portion of Demosthenes, and 
could "rub up her rusty Greek" at need to bandy pedantry with a 
Vice-Chancellor. But she was far from being a mere pedant. The new 
literature which was springing up around her found constant welcome 
in her Court. She spoke Italian and French as fluently as her mother 
tongue. She was familiar with Ariosto and Tasso. In spite of the 
affectation of her style, and her taste for anagrams and puerilities, she 
listened with delight to the " Faery Queen," and found a smile for 
'^Master Spenser" when he appeared in the Presence. Her moral 



VII. 1 



THE REFORMATION, 



363 



temper recalled in its strange contrasts the mixed blood within her 
veins. She was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn. 
From her father she inherited her frank and hearty address, her love 
of popularity and of free intercourse with the people, her dauntless 
courage, and her amazing self-confidence. Her harsh manlike voice, 
her impetuous will, her pride, her furious outbursts of anger came to 
her with her Tudor blood. She rated great nobles as if they were 
schoolboys ; she met the insolence of Essex with a box on the ear ; 
she would break, now and then, into the gravest deliberations to swear 
at her ministers like a fishwife. But strangely in contrast with the 
violent outlines of her Tudor temper stood the sensuous, self-indulgent 
nature she derived from Anne Boleyn. Splendour and pleasure were 
with Ehzabeth the very air she breathed. Her delight was to move in 
perpetual progresses from castle to castle through a series of gorgeous 
pageants, fanciful and extravagant as a Caliph's dream. She loved 
gaiety and laughter and w4t. A happy retort or a finished compHment 
never failed to win her favour. She hoarded jewels. Her dresses 
were innumerable. Her vanity remained, even to old age, the vanity 
of a coquette in her teens. No adulation was too fulsome for her, no 
flattery of her beauty too gross. " To see her was heaven," Hutton 
told her, " the lack of her was hell." She would play with her rings 
that her courtiers might note the dehcacy of her hands ; or dance a 
coranto, that the French ambassador, hidden dexterously behind a 
curtain, might report her sprightliness to his master. Her levity, her 
frivolous laughter, her unwomanly jests gave colour to a thousand 
scandals. Her character, in fact, like her portraits, was utterly without 
shade. Of womanly reserve or self-restraint she knew nothing. No 
instinct of delicacy veiled the voluptuous temper which had broken 
out in the romps of her girlhood, and showed itself alm.ost osten- 
tatiously throughout her later life. Personal beauty in a man was a 
sure passport to her liking. She patted handsome young squires on 
the neck when they knelt to kiss her hand, and fondled her " sweet 
Robin," Lord Leicester, in the face of the Court. 

It was no wonder that the statesmen whom she outwitted held 
Elizabeth almost to the last to be little more than a frivolous woman ; 
or that Philip of Spain wondered how "" a wanton " could hold in 
check the policy of the Escurial. But the Elizabeth whom they saw 
was far from being all of Elizabeth. The wilfulness of Henry, the 
triviality of Anne Boleyn played over the surface of a nature hard as 
steel, a temper purely intellectual, the very type of reason im- 
louched by imagination or passion. Luxurious and pleasure-loving 
as she seemed, Ehzabeth lived simply and frugally, and she worked 
hard. Her vanity and caprice had no weight whatever with her in 
state affairs. The coquette of the presence chamber became the 
coolest and hardest of politicians at the council board. Fresh from 



Elizabeth. 
1558- 
1560. 



3^4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Cjiap. 



the flattery of her courtiers, she would tolerate no flattery in the 
closet; she was herself plain and downright of speech with her 
counsellors, and she looked for a corresponding plainness of speech 
in return. Her expenditure was parsimonious and even miserly. If 
any trace of her sex lingered in her actual statesmanship, it was seen in 
the simplicity and tenacity of purpose that often underlies a woman's 
fluctuations of feeling. It was this in part which gave her her 
marked superiority over the statesmen of her time. No nobler group 
of ministers ever gathered round a council board than those who 
gathered round the council board of Elizabeth. But she is the in- 
strument of none. She listens, she weighs, she uses or puts by the 
counsels of each in turn, but her policy as a^whole is her own. It was 
a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. [Her aims were simple and 
obvious : to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore 
civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timid- 
ity, perhaps, backed the passionless indifference with which she set 
aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before 
her eyes. She was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She 
rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants to make her " head 
of the Religion" and "mistress of the Seas." But her amazing 
success in the end sprang mainly from this wise limitation of her aims. 
She had a finer sense than any of her counsellors of her real resources ; 
she knew instinctively how far she could go, and what she could do. 
Her cold, critical intellect was never swayed by enthusiasm or by 
panic either to exaggerate or to under-estimate her risks or her power. 
Of political wisdom, indeed, in its larger and more generous sense, 
Elizabeth had little or none ; but her political tact was unerring. She 
seldom saw her course at a glance, but she played with a hundred 
courses, fitfully and discursively, as a musician runs his fingers over the 
key-board, till she hit suddenly upon the right one. Such a nature 
was essentially practical and of the present. She distrusted a plan, 
in fact, just in proportion to its speculative range, or its out-look into 
the future. Her notion of statesmanship lay in watching how things 
turned out around her, and in seizing the moment for making the best 
of them, 'f A policy of this limited, practical, tentative order was not 
only best suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and 
the transitional character of its religious and political belief, but it 
was one eminently suited to Elizabeth's peculiar powers. It was a 
policy of detail, and in details her wonderful readiness and ingenuity 
found scope for their exercise. " No War, my Lords," the Queen used 
to cry imperiously at the council board, " No War ! " but her hatred of 
war sprang less from aversion to blood or to expense, real as was her 
aversion to both, than from the fact that peace left the held open to 
the diplomatic manoeuvres and intrigues in which she excelled. It 
was her delight in the consciousness of her ingenuity which broke out 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION-. 



365 



in a thousand puckish freaks, freaks in which one can hardly see any 
purpose beyond the purpose of sheer mystification. She revelled in 
" bye-ways " and " crooked ways." She played with grave cabinets as 
a cat plays with a mouse, and with much of the same feline delight in 
the mere embarrassment of her victims. When she was weary of mys- 
tifying foreign statesmen she turned to find fresh sport in mystifying 
her own ministers. Had Elizabeth written the story of her reign 
she would have prided herself, not on the triumph of England or 
the ruin of Spain, but on the skill with which she had hoodwinked 
and outwitted every statesman in Europe during fifty years. Nor 
was her trickery without political value. Ignoble, inexpressibly 
wearisome as the Queen's diplomacy seems to us now, tracing it as 
we do through a thousand despatches, it succeeded in its main end. 
It gained time, and every year that was gained doubled Elizabeth's 
strength. Nothing is more revolting in the Queen, but nothing is 
more characteristic, than her shameless mendacity. It was an age 
of political lying, but in the profusion and recklessness of her lies 
Ehzabeth stood without a peer in Christendom. A falsehood was 
to her simply an intellectual means of meeting a difficulty ; and the 
ease with which she asserted or denied whatever suited her pur- 
pose was only equalled by the cynical indifference with which she 
met the exposure of her lies as soon as their purpose was answered. 
The same purely intellectual view of things showed itself in the dex- 
terous use she made of her very faults. Her levity carried her gaily 
over moments of detection and embarrassment where better women 
would have died of shame. She screened her tentative and hesitating 
statesmanship under the natural timidity and vacillation of her sex. 
She turned her very luxury and sports to good account. There were 
moments of grave danger in her reign when the country remained 
indifferent to its perils, as it saw the Queen give her days to hawking 
and hunting, and her nights to dancing and plays. Her vanity and 
affectation, her womanly fickleness and caprice, all had their part in 
the diplomatic comedies she played with the successive candidates 
for her hand. If political necessities made her life a lonely one, she 
had at any rate the satisfaction of averting war and conspiracies by 
love sonnets and romantic interviews, or of gaining a year of tran- 
quillity by the dexterous spinning out of a flirtation. 

As we track Elizabeth through her tortuous mazes of lying and in- 
trigue, the sense of her greatness is almost lost in a sense of contempt. 
But, wrapt as they were in a cloud of mystery, the aims of her policy 
were throughout temperate and simple, and they were pursued with a 
singular tenacity. The sudden acts of energy which from time to 
time broke her habitual hesitation proved that it was no hesitation of 
weakness. Elizabeth could wait and finesse ; but when the hour was 
c^me she could strike, and strike hard. Her natural temper, indeed, 



366 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



tended to a rash self-confidence rather than to self-distrust. She had, 
as strong natures always have, an unbounded confidence in her luck. 
" Her Majesty counts much on Fortune," Walsingham wrote bitterly ; 
" I wish she would trust more in Almighty God." The diplomatists 
who censured at one moment her irresolution, her delay, her changes 
of front, censure at the next her " obstinacy," her iron will, her defiance 
of what seemed to them inevitable ruin. " This woman," Phihp's envoy 
wrote after a wasted remonstrance, — "this woman is possessed by 
a hundred thousand devils." To her own subjects, indeed, who 
knew nothing of her manoeuvres and retreats, of her "bye-ways" 
and "crooked ways," she seemed the embodiment of dauntless 
resolution. Brave as they were, the men who swept the Spanish main 
or glided between the icebergs of Baffin's Bay never doubted that the 
palm of bravery lay with their Queen. Her steadiness and courage in 
the pursuit of her aims was equalled by the wisdom with which she chose 
the men to accomplish them. She had a quick eye for merit of any 
sort, and a wonderful power of enlisting its whole energy in her service. 
None of our sovereigns ever gathered such a group of advisers to their 
council board as gathered round the council board of Elizabeth, but the 
sagacity which chose Burleigh and Walsingham. was just as unerring 
in its choice of the meanest of her agents. Her success, indeed, in 
securing from the beginning of her reign to its end, with the single excep- 
tion of Leicester, precisely the right men for the work she set them to do, 
sprang in great measure from the noblest characteristic of her intellect. 
If in loftiness of aim her temper fell below many of the tempers of 
her time, in the breadth of its range, in the universality of its sympathy 
it stood far above them all. Elizabeth could talk poetry with Spenser 
and philosophy with Bruno ; she could discuss Euphuism with Lyly, and 
enjoy the chivalry of Essex ; she could turn from talk of the last fashions 
to pore with Cecil over despatches and treasury books ; she could pass 
from tracking traitors with Walsingham to settle points of doctrine 
with Parker, or to calculate with Frobisher the chances of a north-west 
passage to the Indies. The versatility and many-sidedness of her mind 
enabled her to understand every phase of the intellectual movement 
of her day, and to fix by a sort of instinct on its higher representatives. 
But the greatness of the Queen rests above all on her power over her 
people. We have had grander and nobler rulers, but none so popular as 
Elizabeth. The passion of love, of loyalty, of admiration which finds 
its most perfect expression in the " Faery Queen," pulsed as intensely 
through the veins of her meanest subjects. To England, during her 
reign of half a century, she was a virgin and a Protestant Queen ; and her 
immorality, her absolute want of religious enthusiasm, failed utterly to 
blur the brightness of the national ideal. Her worst acts broke fruitlessly 
against the general devotion. A Puritan, whose hand she hacked off in 
a freak of tyrannous resentment, waved the stump round his head, and 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



367 



shouted " God save Queen Elizabeth." Of her faults, indeed, England 
beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of 
her diplomacy were never seen outside the Royal closet. The nation at 
large could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its tem- 
perance and good sense, and, above all, by its success. But every Enghsh- 
man was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, 
her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her government, the 
judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring factions, 
which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when 
almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every 
sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the 
mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every manor, 
told, and justly told, in Elizabeth's favour. In one act of her civil ad- 
ministration she showed the boldness and originality of a great ruler ; for 
the opening of her reign saw her face the social difficulty which had so 
long impeded English progress, by the issue of a commission of inquiry 
which ended in the solution of the problem by the system of poor-laws. 
For commerce indeed laws could do little ; and Elizabeth's active 
interference hindered rather than furthered its advance ; but the inter- 
ference was for the most part well meant, and her statue in the centre 
of the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant- 
class to the interest with which she watched, and shared personally in, 
its enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memories of 
the Terror and of the Martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion 
from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never 
wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all, there was a general 
confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her 
finger was always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she 
could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way 
before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy had uncon- 
sciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace 
of victory ; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back 
at once the love that her resistance had lost. Her attitude at home, 
in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her 
subjects, and whose longing for their favour, was the one warm touch 
in the coldness of her natural temper. If Elizabeth could be said to 
love anything, she loved England. " Nothing," she said to her first 
Parliament in words of unwonted fire, '' nothing, no worldly thing 
under the sun, is so dear to me as the love and good-will of my 
subjects." And the love and good-will which v/ere so dear to her she 
fully won. 

She clung perhaps to her popularity the more passionately that it 
liid in some measure from her the terrible loneliness of her life. She 
v/as the last of the Tudors, the last of Henry's children ; and her 
nearest relatives were Mary Stuart and the House of Suffolk, one the 



368 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



Chap. 



avowed, the other the secret claimant of her throne. Among her 
mother's kindred she found but a distant cousin. Whatever womanly 
tenderness she had, wrapt itself around Leicester ; but a marriage with 
Leicester was impossible, and every other union, could she even have 
bent to one, was denied to her by the political difficulties of her 
position. The one cry of bitterness which burst from EHzabeth 
revealed her terrible sense of the solitude of her life. " The Queen 
of Scots," she cried at the birth of James, " has a fair son, and I am 
but a barren stock." But the loneliness of her position only reflected 
the loneliness of her nature. She stood utterly apart from the world 
around her, sometimes above it, sometimes below it, but never of it. 
It was only on her intellectual side that Elizabeth touched the 
England of her day. All its moral aspects were simply dead to her. 
It was a time when men were being lifted into nobleness by the new 
moral energy which seemed suddenly to pulse through the whole 
people ; when honour and enthusiasm took colours of poetic beauty, and 
religion became a chivalry. But the finer sentiments of the men around 
her touched Elizabeth simply as the fair tints of a picture would have 
touched her. She made her market with equal indifference out of the 
heroism of WiUiam of Orange or the bigotiy of Phihp. The noblest 
aims and lives were only counters on her board. She was the one 
soul in her realm whom the news of St. Bartholomew stirred to no 
lasting thirst for vengeance ; and while England was thrilling with its 
triumph over the Armada, its Queen was coolly grumbling over the cost, 
and making her profit out of the spoilt provisions she had ordered for 
the fleet that saved her. To the voice of gratitude, indeed, she was 
absolutely deaf. She accepted service, such as never was rendered 
to an English sovereign, without a thought of return. Walsingham 
spent his fortune in saving her life and her throne, and she left him 
to die a beggar. Whatever odium or loss her manoeuvres incurred 
she flung upon her councillors. To screen her part in Mary's death 
she called on Davison to perish broken-hearted in the Tower. But as 
if by a strange irony, it was to this very want of sympathy that she 
owed some of the grander features of her character. If she was 
without love, she was without hate. She cherished no petty resent- 
-^ments ; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served 
her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good-humour was never 
ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the 
Jesuits filled every court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her 
life became at last the mark for assassin after assassin, but the 
thought of peril was the one hardest to bring home to her. Even 
when the Catholic plots broke out in her very household, she would 
listen to no proposals for the removal of Catholics from her court. 

It was this moral isolation which told so strangely both for good 
and for evil on her policy towards the Church. No woman ever lived 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



369 



who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion. While the 
world around her was being swayed more and more by theological 
beliefs and controversies, Elizabeth was absolutely untouched by them. 
She was a child of the Italian Renascence rather than of the New 
Learning of Colet or Erasmus, and her attitude towards the enthu- 
siasm of her time was that of Lorenzo de' Medici towards Savonarola. 
Her mind was unruffled by the spiritual problems which were vexing 
the minds around her ; to Elizabeth, indeed, they were not only 
unintelligible, they were a little ridiculous. She had the same intel- 
lectual contempt for the coarser superstition of the Romanist as for 
the bigotry of the Protestant. She ordered images to be flung into 
the fire, and quizzed the Puritans as "brethren in Christ." But she 
had no sort of religious aversion for either Puritan or Papist. The 
Protestants grumbled at the Catholic nobles whom she admitted to 
the presence. The Catholics grumbled at the Protestant statesmen 
v/hom she called to her council board. But to Elizabeth the arrange- 
ment was the most natural thing in the world. She looked at theo- 
logical differences in a purely pohtical light. She agreed with Henry 
the Fourth that a kingdom was well worth a mass. It seemed an 
obvious thing to her to hold out hopes of conversion as a means of 
deceiving Philip, or to gain a point in negotiation by restoring the 
crucifix to her chapel. The first interest in her own mind was the 
interest of public order, and she never could understand how it could 
fail to be first in everyone's mind. Her ingenuity set itself to con- 
struct a system in which ecclesiastical unity should not jar against 
the rights of conscience ; a compromise which merely required outer 
" conformity '^ to the established worship while, as she was never weary 
of repeating, it " left opinion free." For this purpose she fell back 
from the very first on the system of Henry the Eighth. " I v/ill do," 
she told the Spanish ambassador, " as my father did." She let the 
connexion with Rome drop quietly without any overt act of sepa- 
ration. The first work of her Parliament was to undo the work of 
Mar>', to repeal the Statutes of Heresy, to dissolve the refounded 
monasteries, and to restore the Royal Supremacy. At her entry 
into London Elizabeth kissed the English Bible ^vhich the citizens pre- 
sented to her, and promised " diligently to read therein." Further she 
had no personal wish to go. A third of the Council, and two-thirds 
of the people, w^ere as opposed to any radical changes in religion as 
tl:e Queen. Among the gentry the older and wealthier were on the 
conservative side, and only the younger and meaner on the other. 
But it was soon necessary to go further. If the Protestants were the 
less numerous, they were the abler and the more vigorous party ; and 
the exiles who returned from Geneva brought with them a fiercer hatred 
of Catholicism. Transubstantiation and the Mass were identified 
with the fires of Smithfield, while Edward's Prayer-book was hallowed 

B B 



370 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



fCHAP. 



by the memories of the Martyrs. But, in her restoration of the Enghsh 
Prayer-book, some shght alterations made by Ehzabeth in its language 
showed her wish to conciliate the Catholics as far as possible. She 
had no mind to commit herself to the system of the Protectorate. 
She dropped the words "Head of the Church ^^ from the Royal, title. 
The forty-two Articles were left for some years in abeyance. If Eliza- 
beth had had her will, she would have retained the celibacy of the 
clergy, and restored the use of crucifixes in the churches. JBut she 
was again foiled by the increased bitterness of the religious division. 
The London mob tore down the crosses in the streets. Her attempt 
to retain the crucifix fell dead before the fierce opposition of the 
Protestant clergy. On the other hand, the Marian bishops, with a 
single exception, discerned the Protestant drift of the changes she was 
making, and bore imprisonment and deprivation rather than accept 
them. But to the mass of the nation the compromise of Elizabeth seems 
to have been fairly acceptable. The whole of the clergy, save two 
hundred, submitted to the Act of Supremacy, and adopted the Prayer- 
book. No marked repugnance to the new worship was shown by the 
people at large ; and Elizabeth was able to turn from questions of 
belief to the question of order. On one point in the treatment of the 
Church she was resolved to make no difference. To the end of her 
reign she remained as bold a plunderer of its wealth as either of her 
predecessors, and carved out rewards for her ministers from the 
Church-lands with a queenly disregard of the rights of property. 
Lord Burleigh built up the estate of the house of Cecil out of the 
demesnes of the see of Peterborough. The neighbourhood of Hatton 
Garden to Ely Place recalls the spoliation of another bishopric in 
favour of the Queen's sprightly chancellor. Her reply to the bishop's 
protest against this robbery showed what Elizabeth meant by her 
Ecclesiastical Supremacy. " Proud prelate," she wrote, " you know 
what you were before I made you what you are ! If you do not 
immediately comply with my request, by God I will unfrock you." 
But she suffered no plunder save her own, and she was earnest for the 
restoration of order and decency in the outer arrangements of the 
Church. 

Her selection of Parker, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, as her 
agent in its reorganization was probably dictated by the correspond- 
ence of his character with that of the Queen. Theologically the 
Primate was a moderate man, but he was resolute to restore order 
in the discipline and worship of the Church. The whole machinery 
of public religion had been thrown out of gear by the rapid and 
radical changes of the past two reigns. In some dioceses a third of 
the parishes were without clergymen. The churches themselves were 
falUng into ruin. The majority of the parish priests were still Catholic 
in heart ; in the north, indeed, they made little disguise of their re- 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION. 



371 



actionary tendencies. On the other hand, the Protestant minority 
among the clergy were already disgusting the people by their violence 
and greed. Chapters had begun to plunder their own estates by 
leases and fines and by felling timber. The marriages of the clergy 
were a perpetual scandal, a scandal which was increased .when the 
gorgeous vestments of the old worship were cut up into gowns and 
bodices for the priests' wives. The new services became scenes of 
utter disorder, where the clergy wore what dress they pleased, and 
the communicant stood or sate as he liked ; while the old altars were 
broken down and the communion-table was often a bare board upon 
trestles. The people, naturally enough, w^ere found to be *^ utterly 
devoid of religion," and came to church " as to a May game." To 
the difficulties which Parker found in the temper of the Reformers and 
their opponents, new difficulties were added by the freaks of the- 
Queen. If she had no convictions, she had tastes ; and her taste 
revolted from the bareness of Protestant ritual, and above all from 
the marriage of priests. " Leave that alone," she shouted to Dean 
Nowell from the Royal closet as he denounced the use of images — 
'^ Stick to your text, Master Dean, leave that alone!" Parker how- 
(^ver was firm in resisting the introduction of the crucifix or of 
celibacy, and Elizabeth showed her resentment at his firmness by an 
insult to his wife. Married ladies were addressed at this time as 
" Madam," unmarried ladies as " Mistress ; " and when Mrs. Parker 
advanced at the close of a sumptuous entertainment at Lambeth to 
lake leave of the Queen, Elizabeth feigned a momentary hesitation. 
'* Madam,'' she said at last, " I may not call you, and Mistress I am 
loth to call you ; however I thank you for your good cheer." But 
freaks of this sort had little real influence on the Queen's policy, or on 
the steady support which she gave to the Primate in his work of order. 
The vacant sees were filled for the most part with learned and able 
men ; the plunder of the Church by the nobles was checked ; and j 
England was settling quietly down again in religious peace when a pro- 1 
hibition from Rome forbade the presence of Catholics at the new wor- j 
ship. The order was widely obeyed, and the obedience was accepted ! 
by Ehzabeth as a direct act of defiance. Heavy "fines for recusancy," 
levied on all who absented them.selves from church, became a constant 
source of supply to the Royal exchequer. Meanwhile Parker was 
labouring for a uniformity of faith and worship amongst the clergy. 
Of the forty-two articles enjoined by Edward, thirty-nine were re- 
stored as a standard of belief, and a commission was opened by the 
Queen's order at Lambeth, with the Primate at its head, to enforce the 
Act of Uniformity in all matters of public worship. At one critical 
moment the extreme Protestants took alarm, churchwardens in London 
refused to provide surplices, and for a time it was necessary to suspend 
the more recalcitrant ministers. But the work of the Commission 

B B 2 



37^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



was too clearly needed to be permanently resisted ; the more extreme 
Protestants were suffered to preach by connivance ; and throughout 
the Church at large some kind of decent order was restored. 

The settlement of religion however was the least pressing of the 
cares which met Elizabeth as she mounted the throne. The country 
was drained by war ; yet she could only free herself from war, and 
from the dependence on Spain which it involved, by acquiescing in the 
loss of Calais. But though peace was won by the sacrifice, France 
remained openly hostile ; the Dauphin and his wife, Mary Stuart, 
assumed the arms and style of King and Queen of England ; and their 
pretensions became a source of immediate danger through the pre- 
sence of a French army in Scotland. To understand, however, what 
had taken place there we must cursorily review the past hist-ory of 
the Northern Kingdom. From the moment when England finally 
abandoned the fruitless effort to subdue it, the story of Scotland had 
been a miserable one. Whatever peace might be concluded, a sleep- 
less dread of the old danger from the South tied the country to an 
alliance with France, which dragged it into the vortex of the Hundred 
Years' War. But after the great defeat and capture of David in 
the field of Neville's Cross, the struggle died down on both sides 
into marauding forays and battles, like those of Otterburn and 
Homildon Hill, in which alternate victories were won by the feudal 
lords of the Scotch or English border. The ballad of " Chevy Chase " 
brings home to us the spirit of the contest, the daring and defiance 
which stirred Sidney's heart '^ like a trumpet," but its effect on the 
internal development of Scotland was utterly ruinous. The houses 
of Douglas and of March, which it raised into supremacy, only 
interrupted their strife with England to battle fiercely with one 
another or to coerce the King. The power of the Crown sank in fact 
into insignificance under the earlier sovereigns of the line of Stuart, 
which had succeeded to the throne on the extinction of the male 
line of Bruce. Invasions and civil feuds not only arrested, but even 
rolled back the national industry and prosperity. The country was 
a chaos of disorder and misrule, in which the peasant and the 
trader were the victims of feudal outrage. The Border became 
a lawless land, where robbery and violence reigned utterly without 
check. So pitiable seemed the state of the kingdom that the 
clans of the Highlands drew together at last to swoop upon it as a 
certain prey ; but the common peril united the factions of the 
nobles, and the victory of Harlaw saved the Lowlands from, the rule 
of the Celt. A great name at last broke the line of its worthless 
kings. Schooled by a long captivity in England, James the First 
returned to his realm to be the ablest of her rulers, as he was the first 
of her poets. In the twelve years of a short but wonderful reign, 
justice and order were restored for a while, the Parliament organized 



VlT.l 



THE REFORMATION. 



373 



on the English model, the clans of the Highlands assailed in their own 
fastnesses and reduced to swear fealty to the "Saxon" king. He 
turned to assail the great houses, but feudal violence was still too 
stiong for the hand of the law, and a band of ruffians who burst into 
the Royal chamber left the King lifeless with sixteen stabs in his body. 
The death of James was the signal for an open struggle for supremacy 
between the House of Douglas and the Crown, which lasted through 
half a century. Order, however, crept gradually in ; the exile of the 
Douglases left the Scottish monarchs supreme in the Lowlands ; while 
their dominion over the Highlands was secured by the ruin of the Lords 
of the Isles. The fatal contest with England ceased with the acces- 
sion of the House of Tudor ; and the policy of Henry the Seventh 
bound for a time the two kingdoms together by bestowing the hand 
of his daughter Margaret on the Scottish king. The union was soon 
dissolved however by his son's claims of supremacy, and by the 
intrigues of Wolsey ; war broke out anew, and the terrible defeat and 
death of James the Fourth at Flodden Field involved his realm in the 
turbulence and misrule of a minority. The actual reign of his succes- 
sor, James the Fifth, had hardly begun, when his sympathies with 
the English Catholics aided the ambition of Somerset in plunging 
the two countries into a fresh struggle. His defeat at Sohvay Moor 
brought the young King broken-hearted to his grave. "It came with 
a lass and it will go with a lass," he cried, as they brought him on his 
death-bed the news of Mary Stuart's birth. The hand of his infant 
successor at once became the subject of rivalry between England and 
France. Had Mary, as Somerset desired, been wedded to Edvrard 
the Sixth, the whole destinies of Europe might have been changed by 
the union of the two realms ; but the recent bloodshed had embittered 
Scotland, and the high-handed way in which the English statesmen 
pushed their marriage project completed the breach. Somerset's in- 
vasion and victory at Pinkie Clough only enabled Mary of Guise, the 
French wife of James the Fifth, who had become Regent of the realm at 
his death, to induce the Scotch estates to consent to the union of her 
child with the heir of the French crown, the Dauphin Francis. From 
that moment, as we have seen, the claims of the Scottish Queen on 
the English throne became so formidable a danger as to drive Mary 
Tudor to her marriage with Philip of Spain. But the danger became 
a still greater one on the accession of Elizabeth, whose legitimacy 
no Catholic acknowledged, and whose religious attitude tended to 
throw the Catholic party into her rival's hands. 

In spite of the peace with France, therefore, Francis and Mary 
persisted in their pretensions ; and a French force which occupied 
Leith was slowly increased, with the connivance of Mary of Guise. 
The appearance of this force on the Border was intended to bring 
about a Catholic rising. But the hostility between France and Spain 



374 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chai*. 



bound Philip, for the moment, to the support of EHzabeth ; and his 
influence over the Catholics secured quiet for a time. The Queen, too, 
played with their hopes of a religious reaction by talk of her own 
conversion, by the re-introduction of the crucifix into her chapel, and 
by plans for her marriage with an Austrian and Cathohc prince. 
Meanwhile she parried the blow in Scotland itself, where the Refor- 
mation had just begun to gain ground, by secretly encouraging the 
" Lords of the Congregation," as the nobles who headed the Protestant 
party were styled, to rise against the Regent. Elizabeth's diplomacy 
gamed her a year, and her matchless activity used the year to good 
purpose. Order was restored throughout England, the Church was re- 
organized, the debts of the Crown were paid off, the treasury recruited, 
a navy created, and a force was ready for action in the north, when the 
defeat of her Scotch adherents forced her at last to throw aside the 
mask. As yet she stood almost alone in her self-reliance. Spain, while 
supporting her, believed her ruin to be certain ; France despised her 
chances ; her very Council was in, despair. The one minister in whom 
she really confided was Cecil, the youngest and boldest of her advisers, 
and even Cecil trembled for her success. But lies and hesitation were 
no sooner put aside than the Queen's vigour and tenacity came fairly 
into play. Wynter, the English admiral, appeared suddenly on the 
Forth, and forced D'Oysel, the French commander, to fall back upon 
Leith, at the moment when he was on the point of crushing the 
Lords of the Congreg*ation. France was taken by surprise, and 
could give little help save by negotiation ; but Elizabeth refused to 
accept any terms save the withdrawal of every Frenchman, and the; 
abandonment of the claim of Mary Stuart upon her crown. On 
the refusal of these terms. Lord Grey moved over the border with 
8,000 men to join the Lords of the Congregation in the siege of Leith. 
The Scots, indeed, gave little aid ; and Philip, in his jealousy of 
Elizabeth's sudden strength, demanded the abandonment of the enter- 
prise ; while an assault on the town signally failed. But EHzabeth was 
immoveable. Famine did its work better than the sword ; and in the 
Treaty of Edinburgh the French bought the liberation of their army 
by a pledge to abandon the kingdom, and by an admission of the 
Queen's title to her throne. The government of Scotland was placed 
in the hands of a council of its lords ; and the provision which 
secured for the Protestants the free exercise of their religion bound to 
Elizabeth a party which would be of service to her in any danger from 
the North. 



i"' 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



375 



Section IV.— England and Mary Stuart. 1560— 1572. 

[Authorities. — To those mentioned in the previous section, we may add 
Strype's ** Lives of Grindal and Whitgift," the French despatches of Fenelon, 
Howell's " State Trials ;'' and for the Dutch revolt Motley's '' History of the 
United Netherlands."] 

The issue of the Scotch war revealed suddenly to Europe the vigour 
of Elizabeth, and the real strength of her throne. She had freed her- 
self from the control of Philip, she had defied France, she had 
averted the danger from the North by the creation of an English party 
among the nobles of Scotland. The same use of religious divisions 
soon gave her a similar check on the hostihty of France. The 
Huguenots, as the French Protestants were called, had become a 
formidable party under the guidance of the Admiral Cohgny ; and 
the defeat of their rising against the family of the Guises, who stood 
at the head of the French Catholics^ and were supreme at the Court 
of Francis and Mar}% threw them on the support and alliance of 
Elizabeth. But if the decisive outbreak of the great religious struggle, 
so long looked for between the Old Faith and the New, gave Elizabeth 
strength abroad, it weakened her at home. Her Catholic subjects lost 
all hope of her conversion as they saw the Queen allying herself with 
the Scotch lords and the French Huguenots ; her hopes of a rehgious 
compromise in matters of worship were broken by the issue of a 
Papal brief which forbade attendance at the English service ; and 
Philip of Spain, freed like herself from the fear of France by its 
religious divisions, no longer held the English Cathohcs in check. 
He was preparing, in fact, to take a new political stand as the patron 
of Catholicism throughout the world ; and his troops were directed 
to support the Guises in the civil war which broke out after the 
death of Francis the Second, and to attack the heretics wherever they 
might find them. " Religion," he told Elizabeth, " was being made 
a cloak for anarchy and revolution." It was at the moment when 
the last hopes of -the English Cathohcs were dispelled by the Queen's 
refusal to take part in the Council of Trent, that Mary Stuart, whom 
the death of her husband had left a stranger in France, landed 
suddenly at Leith. Girl as she was, and she was only nineteen, she 
was hardly inferior in intellectual power to Elizabeth herself, while in 
lire and grace and brilliancy of temper she stood high above her. She 
brought with her the voluptuous refinement of the French Renascence ; 
she would lounge for days in bed, and rise only at night for dances 
and music. But her frame was of iron, and incapable of fatigue ; 
she galloped ninety miles after her last defeat without a pause save 
to change horses. She loved risk and adventure and the ring of arms ; 
as she rode in a foray against Huntley, the grim swordsman beside 



376 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



rcHAP. 



her heard her wish she was a man, " to know what Hfe it was to 
he all night in the field, or to watch on the cawsey with a Glasgow 
buckler and a broadsword." But in the closet she was as cool and 
astute a politician as Elizabeth herself ; with plans as subtle, but of a 
far wider and grander range than the Queen's. " Whatever policy is 
in all the chief and best practised heads of France," wrote an English 
envoy, " whatever craft, falsehood, and deceit is in all the subtle brains 
of Scotland, is either fresh in this woman's memory, or she can fetch 
it out with a wet finger. '' Her beauty, her exquisite grace of "manner, 
her generosity of temper and warmth of affection, her frankness 
of speech, her sensibility, her gaiety, her womanly tears, her manlike 
courage, the play and freedom of her nature, the flashes of poetry 
that broke from her at every intense moment of her life, flung a spell 
over friend or foe which has only deepened with the lapse of years. 
Even to Knollys, the sternest Puritan of his day, she seemed in 
her captivity to be " a notable woman.'^ " She seemeth to regard no 
ceremonious honour besides the acknowledgment of her estate royal. 
She showeth a disposition to speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, to 
be very familiar. She showeth a great desire to be avenged on her 
enemies. She shows a readiness to expose herself to all perils in hope 
of victory. She desires much to hear of hardiness and valiancy, com- 
mending by name all approved hardy men of her country though 
they be her enemies, and she concealeth no cowardice even in her 
friends." As yet men knew nothing of the stern bigotry, the intensity 
of passion which lay beneath the winning surface of Mary's woman- 
hood. But they at once recognized her political ability. She had 
seized eagerly on the new strength which was given her by her 
husband's death. Her cause was no longer hampered, either in 
Scotland or in England, by a national jealousy of French interference. 
It was with a resolve to break the league between Elizabeth and 
the Scotch Protestants, to unite her own realm around her, and thus 
to give a firm base for her intrigues among the English Catholics, that 
Mary landed at Leith. The effect of her presence was marvellous. 
Her personal fascination revived the national loyalty, and swept all 
Scotland to her feet. Knox, the greatest and sternest of the 
Calvinistic preachers, alone withstood her spell. The rough Scotch 
nobles owned that there was in Mary " some enchantment whereby 
men are bewitched." A promise of religious toleration united her 
subjects as one man in support of the temperate claim which she 
advanced to be named Elizabeth's successor in Parliament. But 
the question of the succession, like the question of her marriage.; 
was with Elizabeth a question of life and death. Her wedding with 
a Catholic or a Protestant suitor would have been equally the end 
of her system of balance and national union, a signal for the 
revolt of the party which she disappointed, and for the triumphant 



1 



VII.l 



THE REFORMATION. 



Zll 



dictation of the party which she satisfied. " If a Catholic prince 
come here," a Spanish ambassador wrote while pressing an Austrian 
marriage, " the first mass he attends will be the signal for a revolt." 
To name a Protestant successor from the House of Suffolk would 
have driven every Catholic to insurrection. To name Mary was tc 
stir Protestantism to a rising of despair, and to leave Elizabeth at 
the mercy of every fanatical assassin who wished to clear the way 
for a Catholic ruler. " I am not so foolish," was the Queen's reply to 
Mary, " as to hang a winding sheet before my eyes." But the pressure 
on her was great, and Mary looked to the triumph of Catholicism in 
France to increase the pressure. It was this which drove Elizabeth 
to listen to the cry of the Huguenots at the moment when they were 
yielding to the strength of the Guises. Hate war as she might, 
the instinct of self-preservation dragged her into the great struggle ; 
and in spite of the menaces of Philip, money and seven thousand 
men were sent to the aid of the Protestants under Conde. But a 
fatal overthrow of the Huguenot army at Dreux left the Guises 
masters of France, and brought the danger to the very doors of 
England. The hopes of the English Catholics rose higher, and the 
measures of the Parliament showed its apprehensions of civil war. 
" There has been enough of words," said the Puritan Sir Francis 
Knollys; "it were time to draw sword ;" and the sword was drawn 
in a Test Act, the first in a series of penal statutes which weighed upon 
the English Catholics for two hundred years, by which the oath of 
allegiance and abjuration of the temporal authority of the Pope was 
exacted from all holders of office, lay or spiritual, within the realm, 
with the exception of peers. At this crisis, however, Elizabeth was 
able, as usual, to " count much on Fortune." The assassination of 
the Duke of Guise broke up his party ; a policy of moderation and 
balance prevailed at the French Court ; and Catharine of Medicis, who 
was now supreme, was parted from Mary Stuart by a bitter hate. 

The Queen's good luck was chequered by a merited humiliation. 
She had sold her aid to the Huguenots in their hour of distress at the 
price of the surrender of Havre, and Havre was again wrested from 
her by the reunion of the French parties. But she had secured a 
yearns respite in her anxieties ; and Mary was utterly foiled in her plan 
for bringing the pressure of a united Scotland, backed by France, 
to bear upon her rival. But the defeat only threw her on a yet 
more formidable scheme. She was weary of the mask of religious 
indifference which her policy had forced her to wear with the view of 
securing the general support of her subjects. She resolved now to appeal 
to the Enghsh Catholics on the ground of Catholicism. Their sympa- 
thies had as yet been divided. Next to Mary in the hereditary line of 
succession stood Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, the son of the Countess 
of Lennox, and grandson of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage 



378 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



with the Earl of Angus, as Mary was her grandchild by Margaret's first 
marriage with James the Fourth. The Lennoxes had remained rigid 
Catholics, and it was upon their succession rather than on that of the 
Queen of Scots that the hopes of the English Catholics had till now been 
fixed. It was by a match with Henry Stuart that Mary determined to 
unite the forces of Catholicism. With wonderful subtlety she succeeded 
in dispelling Elizabeth's suspicions, while drawing the boy and his mother 
to her Court ; and the threat of war with which the English Queen 
strove too late to prevent the marriage only succeeded in hastening it. 
The match was regarded on all sides as a challenge to Protestantism. 
Philip, who had till now regarded Mary's pretence of toleration and 
her hopes from France with equal suspicion, was at last warm in com- 
mending her cause. " She is the one gate," he owned, " through which 
Religion can be restored in England. All the rest are closed." The 
Lords of the Congregation woke with a start from their confidence in 
the Queen, and her half-brother, Lord James Stuart, better known 
later on as Earl of Murray, mustered his Protestant confederates. 
But their revolt was hardly declared when Mary marched on them 
with pistols in her belt, and drove their leaders helplessly over the 
Border. Her boldness and energy cowed Elizabeth into the meanest 
dissimulation, v/hile the announcement of her pregnancy soon gave 
her a strength which swept aside Philip's counsels of caution and 
delay. " With the help of God and of your Holiness," Mary wrote 
to the Pope, " I will leap over the wall." Rizzio, an Italian who had 
counselled the marriage, still remained her adviser, and the daring 
advice he gave fell in with her natural temper. She had resolved in 
the coming Parliament to restore Catholicism in Scotland. France 
in a fresh revolution fell again under the Guises, and offered her 
support. The English Catholics of the North prepared to revolt as 
soon as she was ready to aid them. No such danger had ever 
threatened Elizabeth as this, but everything hung on the will of a 
woman whose passions were even stronger than her will. Mary had 
staked all on her union with Darnley, and yet only a few months had 
passed since her wedding day when men saw that she " hated the 
King." The boy turned out a dissolute, insolent husband ; and Mary's 
scornful refusal of his claim of the " crown matrimonial," a refusal 
probably inspired by her Italian minister Rizzio, drove his jealousy 
to madness. At the very moment when the Queen revealed the extent 
of her schemes by the attainder of Murray and his adherents and by 
her dismissal of the English ambassador, the young King, followed by 
his kindred the Douglases, burst into her chamber, dragged Rizzio 
from her presence, and stabbed him brutally on the stair-head. The 
darker features of Mary's character were now to develop themselves. 
Darnley, keen as was her thirst for vengeance on him, was needful as 
yet to her revenge on his abettors, and to the triumph of her political 



VI r.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



579 



aims. She masked her hatred beneath a show of affection which severed 
the wretched boy from his fellow-conspirators ; then, flinging herself 
into Dunbar, she marched in triumph on Edinburgh at the head of eight 
thousand men, while the Douglases and the Protestant Lords who had 
shrunk from joining Murray fled to England or their strongholds. Her 
intrigues with the English Catholics she had never interrupted, and her 
Court was full of Papists from the northern counties. " Your actions," 
Elizabeth wrote in a sudden break of fierce candour, " are as full of 
venom as your words are of honey.'' The birth of her child, the future 
James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, doubled Mary's 
strength. " Her friends were so increased," an ambassador wrote to 
her from England, " that many whole shires were ready to rebel, and 
their captains named by election of the nobility." However exaggerated 
such news may have been, the anxiety of the Parliament which met at 
this crisis proved that the danger was felt to be real. The Houses sav/ 
but one way of providing against it ; and they renewed their appeal for 
the Queen's marriage, and for a settlement of the succession. As we 
liave seen, both of these measures involved even greater dangers than 
they averted ; but Elizabeth stood alone in her resistance to them. 
Even Cecil's fears for "the religion "proved greater than his statesman- 
ship ; and he pressed for a Protestant successor. But the Queen stood 
firm. The promise to marry, which she gave after a furious burst of 
anger, she resolved to evade as she had evaded it before. But the quarrel 
with the Commons which followed on her prohibition of any debate on 
the succession, a quarrel to which we shall recur at a later time, hit 
Elizabeth hard. It was "secret foes at home," she told the Commons 
as their quarrel passed away in a warm reconciliation, who " thought 
to work me that mischief which never foreign enemies could bring to 
pass, which is the hatred of my Commons. Do you think that either 
I am so unmindful of your surety by succession, wherein is all my 
care, or that I went about to break your liberties 1 No ! it never was 
my meaning ; but to stay you before you fell into the ditch." It was 
impossible for her however to explain the real reasons for her course, 
and the dissolution of the Parliament left her face to face with a new 
national discontent added to the ever-deepening peril from without 

One terrible event suddenly struck light through the gathering 
clouds. Mary had used Darnley as a tool to effect the ruin of his 
confederates and to further her policy, but she had never forgiven him. 
The miserable boy was left to wander in disgrace and neglect from 
place to place ; while Mary's purpose of vengeance was quickened by 
Darnley's complaints and intrigues, and yet more by her passion for 
the Earl of Bothwell, the boldest, as he was the most worthless, of the 
younger nobles. Ominous words dropped from her lips. " Unless she 
were freed of him some way," she said at last, " she had no pleasure 
to live." Rumours of an approaching divorce were followed by darker 



38o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chaf. 



whispers among the lords. The terrible secret of the deed which 
followed is still wrapt in a cloud of doubt and mystery, which will 
probably never be wholly dispelled ; but taken simply by themselves 
the facts have a significance which it is impossible to explain away. 
The Queen's hatred to Darnley passed all at once into demonstra- 
tions of the old affection. He had fallen sick with vice and misery, 
and she visited him on his sick bed, and persuaded him to follow her 
to Edinburgh. She visited him again in a ruinous and lonely house 
without the walls, in which he was lodged by her order, kissed him as 
she bade him farewell, and rode gaily back to a wedding-dance at 
Holyrood. Two hours after midnight an awful explosion shook the 
city ; and the burghers rushed out from the gates to find the house of 
Kirk o' Field destroyed, and Darnley's body dead beside the ruins, 
though " with no sign of fire on it." The murder was undoubtedly the 
deed of Bothv/ell. His servants, it was soon known, had stored the 
powder beneath the King's bed-chamber; and the Earl had watched | 
without the walls till the deed was done. But, in spite of gathering ' 
suspicion, and of the charge of murder made formally against him by 
Lord Lennox, no serious steps were taken to investigate the crime ; and 
a rumour that Mary purposed to marry the murderer drove her friends 
to despair. Her agent in England wrote to her that "if she married 
that man she would lose the favour of God, her own reputation, and 
the hearts of all England, Ireland, and Scotland.'^ But every strong- 
hold in the kingdom was soon placed in BothwelFs hands, and this 
step was the prelude to a trial and acquittal which the overwhelming 
force of his followers in Edinburgh turned into a bitter mockery. 
The Earl was married, but a shameless suit for his divorce removed 
this last obstacle to his ambition ; and his seizure of the Queen 
as she rode to Linlithgow was followed three weeks later by their 
union at Dunbar. In a month more all was over. The horror at 
such a marriage with a man fresh from her husband's blood drove 
the whole nation to revolt. Its nobles. Catholic as well as Pro- 
testant, gathered in arms at Stirling ; and their entrance into 
Edinburgh roused the capital into insurrection. Mary and the Earl 
advanced with a fair force to Seton to encounter the Lords ; but 
their men refused to fight, and Bothwell galloped off into lifelong 
exile, while the Queen was brought back to Edinburgh in a frenzy of 
despair, tossing back wild words of defiance to the curses of the 
crowd. From Edinburgh she was carried a prisoner to the fortress of 
Lochleven ; and her brother, the Earl of Miurray, was recalled from 
banishment to accept the Regency of the realm. 

For the moment England was saved, but the ruin of Mary's hopes 
had not come one instant too soon. The great conflict between the 
two religions, which had begun in France, was slowly widening into a 
general struggle over the whole face of Europe. For four years the 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



-.81 



balanced policy of Catharine of Medicis had wrested a truce from both 
Catholics and Huguenots, but Cond^ and the Guises again rose in arms, 
each side eager to find its profit in the new troubles which now broke 
out in Flanders. For the long persecution of the Protestants there, and 
the unscrupulous invasion of the constitutional liberties of the Pro- 
vinces by Philip of Spain, had at last stirred the Netherlands to revolt ; 
and the insurrection was seized by Philip as a pretext for dealing a 
blow he had long meditated at the growing heresy of this portion of 
his dominions. At the moment when Mary entered Lochleven, the 
Duke of Alva was starting with a veteran army on his march to the 
Low Countries ; and with his easy triumph over their insurgent forces 
began the terrible series of outrages and massacres which have made 
his name infamous in history. No event could be more embarrassing 
to Ehzabeth than the arrival of Alva in Flanders. His extirpation of 
heresy there would prove the prelude for his co-operation with the 
Guises in the extirpation of heresy in France. Without counting, too, 
this future danger, the mere triumph of Catholicism, and the presence 
of a Catholic army, in a country so closely connected with England at 
once revived the dreams of a Catholic rising against her throne ; while 
the news of Alva's massacres stirred in every one of her Protestant sub- 
jects a thirst for revenge which it was hard to hold in check. Yet to 
strike a blow at Alva was impossible, for Antwerp was the great mart 
of English trade, and its master had our rising commerce in his power. 
A final stoppage of the trade with Flanders would have broken half the 
merchants in London. Every day was deepening the perplexities of 
Elizabeth, when Mary succeeded in making her escape from Lochleven. 
Defeated at Lahgsyde, where the energy of Murray promptly crushed 
the rising of the Hamiltons in her support, she abandoned all hope of 
Scotland ; and changing her designs with the rapidity of genius, she 
pushed in a light boat across the Solvvay, and was safe before evening 
fell in the castle of Carlisle. Though her power over her own king- 
dom was gone, she saw that imprisonment and suffering had done 
much to wipe away her shame in the hearts of the Catholic party 
across the English border, kindled as they were to new hopes of 
triumph by the victories of Alva. But the presence of Alva in 
Flanders was a far less peril than the presence of Mary in Carlisle. To 
retain her in England was to furnish a centre for revolt ; Mary herself, 
indeed, threatened that "if they kept her prisoner they should have 
enough to do with her." Her ostensible demand was for English aid 
in her restoration to the throne, or for a free passage to France : but 
compliance with the last request would have given the Guises a terrible 
weapon against Elizabeth and have ensured a new French interven- 
tion in Scotland, while to restore her by arms to the crown she had 
lost \yithout some public investigation of the dark crimes laid to her 
charge was impossible. So eager, however, was Elizabeth to get rid of 



5S2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the pressing peril of her presence in England, that Mary's refusal to 
submit to any trial only drove her to fresh devices for her restoration. 
She urged upon Murray the suppression of the graver charges, and 
upon Mary the leaving Murray in actual possession of the Royal power 
as the price of her return. Neither however would listen to terms 
which sacrificed both to Elizabeth's self-interest; the Regent formally 
advanced charges of murder and adultery against the Queen, while Mary 
refused either to answer, or to abdicate in favour of her infant son. The 
triumph indeed of her bold policy was best advanced, as the Queen of 
Scots had no doubt foreseen, by simple inaction. Elizabeth "had the 
wolf by the ears," while the fierce contest which Alva's cruelty roused 
in the Netherlands was firing the temper of the two great parties in 
England. 

In the Court, as in the country, the forces of progress and of 
resistance stood at last in sharp and declared opposition to each other. 
Cecil, at the head of the Protestants, demanded a general alliance 
with the Protestant churches throughout Europe, a war in Flanders 
against Alva, and the unconditional surrender of Mary to her Scotch 
subjects for the punishment she deserved. The Catholics, on the other 
hand, backed by the mass of the Conservative party with the Duke of 
Norfolk at its head, and supported by the wealthier merchants, who 
dreaded the ruin of the Flemish trade, were as earnest in demanding 
the dismissal of Cecil and the Protestants from the council board, a 
steady peace with Spain, and, though less openly, a recognition ol 
Mary's succession. Elizabeth was driven to temporize as before. 
She refused Cecil's counsels ; but she sent money and armiS to Conde, 
and hampered Alva by seizing treasure on its way to him, and by 
pushing the quarrel even to a temporary embargo on shipping either 
side the sea. She refused the counsels of Norfolk ; but she would hear 
nothing of a declaration of war, or give any judgment on the charges 
against the Scottish Queen, or recognize the accession of James in her 
stead. The patience of the great Catholic lords, however, was at last 
exhausted ; and the effect of Mary's presence in England was seen in - 
the rising of the houses of Neville and of Percy. The entry of the | 
Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland into Durham Cathedral 
proved the signal for revolt. The rising was a purely Catholic rising ; 
the Bible and Prayer-book were torn to pieces, and Mass said once 
more at the altar of St. Cuthbert, before the Earls pushed on to 
Doncaster with an army which soon swelled to thousands of men. 
Their cry was " to reduce all causes of religion to the old custom and 
usage ; " and the Earl of Sussex, her general in the north, wrote frankly 
to Elizabeth that '' there were not ten gentlemen in Yorkshire that 
did allow [approve] her proceedings in the cause of religion." But 
he was as loyal as he was frank, and held York stoutly, while the 
Queen deprived the revolt of its most effective weapon by Mary's 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION-. 



3S3 



hasty removal to a new prison at Coventry. The storm however 
broke as rapidly as it had gathered. The mass of the Catholics 
throughout the country made no sign ; and the Earls no sooner halted 
irresolute in presence of this unexpected inaction than their army 
caught the panic and dispersed. Northumberland and Westmoreland 
fled, and were followed in their flight by Lord Dacre of Naworth, the 
greatest noble of the Border ; while their miserable adherents paid for 
their disloyalty in bloodshed and ruin. The ruthless measures of re- 
pression which closed this revolt were the first breach in the clemency 
of Elizabeth's rule, but they were signs of terror which were not lost 
on her opponents. It was the general inaction of the Catholics which 
had foiled the hopes of the northern Earls ; and Rome now did its best 
to stir them to activity by issuing a Bull of Excommunication and 
Deposition against the Queen, which was found nailed in a spirit 
of ironical defiance on the Bishop of London's door. The Catho- 
lics of the north withdrew stubbornly from the Anghcan worship ; 
while Mary, who had been foiled in new hopes of her restoration which 
liad opened through the assassination of the Regent Murray by the 
refusal of the Scotch Lords to accept her, fell back on her old line 
of intrigue in England itself. From the defeated CathoUcs she turned 
to the body of Conservative peers at whose head stood the Duke of 
Norfolk, a man weak in temper, but important as the representative 
of the general reluctance to advance further in a purely Protestant 
direction. His dreams of a marriage with Mary were detected by Cecil, 
and checked by a short sojourn in the Tower ; but his correspondence 
with the Queen was renewed on his release, and ended in an appeal to 
Philip for the intervention of a Spanish army. At the head of this 
appeal stood the name of Mary ; while Norfolk's name was followed 
by those of many lords of "the old blood," as the prouder peers 
styled themselves ; and the significance of the request was heightened 
by gatherings of Catholic refugees at Antwerp round the leaders of 
the Northern Revolt. Enough of these conspiracies was discovered to 
rouse a fresh ardour in the menaced Protestants. The Parliament 
met to pass an act of attainder against the northern Earls, and to 
declare the introduction of Papal Bulls into the country an act of 
high treason. The rising indignation against Mary, as " the daughter 
of Debate, who discord fell doth sow," was shown in a statute, which 
declared any person who laid claim to the Crown during the Queen's 
life-time incapable of ever succeeding to it. The disaffection of 
the Catholics was met by imposing on all magistrates and public 
officers the obligation of subscribing to the Articles of Faith, a measure 
which in fact transferred the administration of justice and public 
order to their Protestant opponents. Meanwhile Norfolk's treason 
ripened into an elaborate plot. Philip had promised aid should the 
revolt actually break out ; but the clue to these negotiations had 



3^4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



long been in Cecil's hands, and before a single step could be taken 
towards the practical realization of his schemes of ambition, they 
were foiled b)'- Norfolk's arrest. With his death and that of North- 
umberland, who followed him to the scaffold, the dread of a revolt 
within the realm, which had so long hung over England, passed 
quietly away. iThe failure of the two attempts not only showed 
the weakness and disunion of the party of discontent and reaction, 
but it revealed the weakness of all party feeling before the rise of 
a national temper which was springing naturally out of the peace of 
Elizabeth's reign, and which a growing sense of danger to the order 
and prosperity around H was fast turning into a passionate loyalty to 
the Queen. It was not merely against Cecil's watchfulness or Eliza- 
beth's cunning that Mary and Philip and the Percies dashed them- 
selves in vain ; it was against a new England. 

Section V.— The England of Elizabeth. 

^Authorities. — For our constitutional history during this period we have 
D'Ewes' Journals, and Townshend's ** Journal of Parliamentary Proceedings, 
from 1580 to 1601," the first detailed account we possess of the proceedings* of 
our House of Commons. The general survey given by Haliam (" Constitutional 
History ") is as judicious as it is able. For trade, &c. , we may consult Macpher- 
son's *' Annals of Commerce," and the section on it in the ** Pictorial History 
of England." Some valuable details are added by Mr. Froude. The general 
literary histoiy is given by Craik (** History of English Literature"), who has 
devoted a separate work to Spenser and his times ; and the sober but narrow 
estimate of Mr. Haliam (^* Literary History") may be contrasted with the more 
brilliart though less balanced comments of M. Taine on the ^vriters of the 
Renascence. ] 

" I have desired," Elizabeth said proudly to her Parliament, " to 
have the obedience of my subjects by love, and not by compulsion." 
It was a love fairly won by justice and good government. Buried as 
she seemed in foreign negotiations and intrigues, Elizabeth was above 
all an English sovereign! She devoted herself ably and energetically to 
the task of civil administration. She had hardly mounted the throne, 
indeed, when she faced the problem of social discontent. Time, and 
the natural development of new branches of industry, were working 
quietly for the relief of the glutted labour-market ; but, as we have seen 
under the Protectorate, a vast mass of disorder still existed in Eng- 
land, which found a constant ground of resentment in the enclosures 
and evictions which accompanied the progress of agricultural change. 
It was on this host of "broken men" that every rebelhon could count 
for support ; their mere existence indeed was an encouragement to civil 
war, while in peace their presence was felt in the insecurity of Hfe and 
property, in gangs of marauders which held whole counties in terror, 
and in "sturdy beggars" who stripped travellers en the road. 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION. 



385 



Under Elizabeth, as under her predecessors, the terrible measures of 
repression, whose uselessness More had in vain pointed out, went 
pitilessly on : we find the magistrates of Somersetshire capturing a 
gang of a hundred at a stroke, hanging fifty at once on the gallows 
and complaining bitterly to the Council of the necessity for waiting 
till the Assizes before they could enjoy the spectacle of the fifty others 
hanging beside them. But the issue of a Royal commission to enquire 
into the whole matter enabled the Government to deal with the 
difficulty in a wiser and more effectual way. The old powers to enforce 
labour on the idle, and settlement on the vagrant class, were continued ; 
but a distinction was for the first time drawn between these and the 
impotent and destitute persons who had been confounded with them ; 
and each town and parish was held responsible for the rehef of its 
indigent and disabled poor, as it had long been responsible for the 
employment of able-bodied mendicants. When voluntary contri- 
butions proved insufficient for this purpose, the justices in sessions 
were enabled by statute to assess all persons in town or parish who 
refused to contribute in proportion to their ability. The principles 
embodied in these measures, the principle of local responsibility for 
local distress, and that of a distinction between the pauper and the 
vagabond, were more clearly defined in a statute which marked the 
middle period of Elizabeth's reign. By this Act houses of correction 
were ordered to be established for the punishment and amendment of 
the vagabond class by means of compulsory labour ; while the power to 
levy and assess a general rate in each parish for the relief of the poor 
was transferred from the justices to its churchwardens. The welU 
known Act which matured and finally established this system, the 43rd 
of Elizabeth, remained the base of our system of pauper-administra^ 
tion until a time within the recollection of living men. Whatever 
flaws a later experience has found in these measures, their wise and 
humane character formed a striking contrast to the legislation which had 
degraded our statute-book from the date of the Statute of Labourers ; 
and their efficacy at the time was proved by the entire cessation of 
the great social danger against which they were intended to provide.^. 
Its cessation however was owing, not merely to law, but to the 
natural growth of wealth and industry throughout the country. The 
change in the mode of cultivation, whatever social embarrassment it 
might bring about, undoubtedly favoured production. Not only was 
a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but the mere change 
in the system brought about a taste for new and better modes of 
agriculture ; the breed of horses and of cattle was improved, and a 
far greater use made of manure and dressings. One acre under the 
new system produced, it was said, as much as two undejr the old. 
As a moj*e careful and constant cultivation was introduced, a greater 
number of hands were required on every farm ; and ijiuch of the 

C C 



Sec. V. 



Thk 

England 



Elizabeth. 



1562. 



i6oi 



Process 

of the 
Coiuitrjs 



386 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



surplus labour which had been ilung off the land in the commence- 
ment of the new system was thus recalled to it. But a far more 
efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was found in the deve- 
lopment of manufactures. ^The linen trade was as yet of small value, 
and that of silk- weaving was only just introduced. But the woollen 
manufacture had become an important element in the national wealth.* 
England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to 
be dyed at Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling', 
and dyeing of cloth, was spreading rapidly from the towns over the 
country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre, 
extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. The farmers' wives 
began everywhere to spin their wool from their own sheep's backs 
into a coarse ''home-spun.*' The South and the West still remainec 
the great seats of industry and of wealth, the great homes of mining 
and manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited to 
Kent and Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already 
threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their 
furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the weald. 
Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin ; and the expor- 
tation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths of the 
West claimed the palm among the woollen stuffs of England. The 
Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the commerce of the 
Channel. Every little harbour, from the Foreland to the Land's End, 
sent out its fleet of fishing-boats, manned with the bold seamen who 
furnished crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. But in the reign of 
Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to which the North had been 
doomed since the fall of the Roman rule begins at last to be broken. 
We see the first signs of the coming revolution which has transferred 
English manufactures and EngUsh wealth to the north of the Mersey 
and the H umber, in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of 
Manchester, the coverlets of York, and the dependence of Halifax on 
its cloth-trade. 

The growth, however, of English commerce far outstripj^ed that of 
its manufactures. We must not judge of it, indeed, by any modern 
standard ; for the whole population of the country can hardly have 
exceeded five or six millions, and the burthen of all the vessels engaged 
in ordinary commerce was estimated at little more than fifty thousand 
tons. The size of the vessels employed in it would now-a-days seem 
insignificant ; a modern collier brig is probably as large as the biggest 
merchant vessel which then sailed from the port of London. But it 
was under Elizabeth that English commerce began the rapid career 
of development which has made us the carriers of the world. By far 
the most important branch of it was with Flanders ; Antwerp and 
Bruges were in fact the general marts of the world in the early part of 
the sixteenth century, and the annual export of English wool and 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



387 



drapery to their markets was estimated at a sum of more than two 
miUions in value. It was with the ruin of Antwerp, at the time of its 
siege and capture by the Duke of Parma, that the commercial supre- 
macy of our own capital may be said to have been first estabHshed. Elizabeth. 
A third of the merchants and manufacturers of the ruined city are 
said to have found a refuge on the banks of the Thames. The export 
Xrade to Flanders died away as London developed into the general 
mart of Europe, where the gold and sugar of the New World were 
found side by side with the cotton of India, the silks of the East, 
'and the woollen stuffs of England itself. The foundation of the 
Royal Exchange by Sir Thomas Gresham was a mark of the com- 
mercial progress of the time. Not only was the old trade of the 
world transferred in great part to the English Channel, but the 
»udden burst of national vigour found new outlets for its activity. 
The Venetian carrying fleet still touched at Southampton ; but as far 
back as the reign of Henry the Seventh a commercial treaty had been 
concluded with Florence, and the trade with the Mediterranean which 
had begun under Richard the Third constantly took a wider develop- 
ment. The intercourse between England and the Baltic ports had 
hitherto been kept up by the Hanseatic merchants ; but the extinc- 
tion of their London depot, the Steel Yard, at this time, was a sign that 
this trade too had now passed into English hands. The growth of Bos- 
ton and Hull marked an increase of commercial intercourse with the 
North. The prosperity of Bristol, which depended in great measure 
on the trade with Ireland, was stimulated by the conquest and colo- 
nization of that island at the close of the Queen's reign and the 
beginning of her successor's. The dream of a northern passage to 
India opened up a trade with a land as yet unknown. Of the three 
ships which sailed under Richard Willoughby to realize this dream, 
two were found afterwards frozen with their crews and their hapless 
commander on the coast of Lapland ; but the third, under Richard 
Chancellor, made its way safely to the White Sea, and by its dis- 
covery of Archangel created the trade with Russia. A more lucrative 
traffic had already begun with the coast of Guinea, to whose gold 
dust and ivory the merchants of Southampton owed their wealth ; 
but the guilt of the Slave Trade which sprung out of it rests with 
John Hawkins, whose arms (a demi-moor, proper, bound with a 
cord) commemorated his priority in the transport of negroes from 
Africa to the labour-fields of the New World. The fisheries of the 
Channel and the German Ocean gave occupation to the numerous 
ports which lined the coast from Yarmouth to Plymouth Haven ; 
Bristol and Chester were rivals in the fisheries of Ulster ; and the 
voyage of Sebastian Cabot from the former port to the mainland of 
North America had called its vessels to the stormy ocean of the 
North. From the time of Henry the Eighth the number of English 

C C 2 



388 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



boats engaged on the cod-banks of Newfoundland steadily increased, 
and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the seamen of Biscay found 
English rivals in the whale-fishery of the Polar seas. 

What Elizabeth really contributed to this commercial development 
was the peace and social order from which it sprang, and the thrift 
which spared the purses of her subjects by enabling her to content 
herself with the ordinary resources of the Crown. She lent, too, a 
ready patronage to the new commerce, she shared in its speculations, 
she considered its extension and protection as a part of public policy, 
and she sanctioned the formation of the great Merchant Companies 
which could then alone secure the trader against wrong or injustice in 
distant countries. The Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body 
which had existed long before, and had received a charter of incorpo- 
ration under Henry the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russian 
Company, and the Company which absorbed the new commerce to the 
Indies. But it was not wholly with satisfaction that either Elizabeth 
or her ministers watched the social change which wealth was producing 
around them, ^hey feared the increased expenditure and comfort 
which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the land and to 
eat out the hardihood of the people. " England spendeth more on 
wines in one year," complained Cecil, " than it did in ancient times in . 
four years." The disuse of salt-fish and the greater consumption of « 
meat marked the improvement which was taking place among the ■ 
agricultural classes. Their rough and wattled farmhouses were being 
superseded by dwellings of brick and stone. Pewter was replacing 
th^ wooden trenchers of the earlier yeomanry; there were yeomen who 
could boast of a fair show of silver plate. It is from this period, 
indeed, that we can first date the rise of a conception which seems to 
us now a peculiarly English one, the conception of domestic comfort. 
The chimney-corner, so closely associated with family life, came into 
existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a feature rare in 
ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows, which had 
before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for 
women in child-bed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded 
the filthy flooring of rushes. The lofty houses of the wealthier mer- 
chants, their parapeted fronts, their costly wainscoting, the cumbrous 
but elaborate beds, the carved staircases, the quaintly figured gables^ 
not only broke the mean appearance which had till then characterized 
English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle and commercial 
class which was to play its part in later historyT; A transformation of 
an even more striking kind proclaimed the extinction of the feudal 
character of the noblesse, (bloomy walls and serried battlements 
disappeared from the dwellings of the gentry. The strength of the 
medjLssval fortress gave way to the pomp and grace of the Elizabethan 
HalL Knowle^ Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



389 



Shc. V. 



The 
England 



.1 



Audley End, are familiar instances of the social as well as archi- 
tectural change which covered England with buildings where the 
thought of defence was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and 
refinement. We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of Elizabeth. 
gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, 
their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great 
nobis looked down on his new Italian garden, its stately terraces, 
and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, 
its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hope- 
less rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South. It was the Italian 
refinement of life which remodelled the interior of such houses, 
raised the principal apartments to an upper floor — a change to which 
we owe the grand staircases of the time — surrounded the quiet courts 
by long "galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with 
huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly 
interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on 
the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly carved chairs and 
costly cabinets. The life of the Middle Ages concentrated itself in 
the vast castle hall, where the baron looked from his upper dais on 
the retainers who gathered at his board. But the great households 
were fast breaking up ; and the whole feudal economy disappeared 
when the lord of the household withdrew with his family into his 
"parlour'^ or " withdrawing-room," and left the hall to his dependants. 
He no longer rode at the head of his servants, but sate apart in the 
newly-introduced "coach." The prodigal use of glass became a 
marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one 
whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be 
over-estimated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of 
the new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. " You 
shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, " your houses so full of 
glass, that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the sun or the 
cold." But the prodigal enjoyment of light and sunshine was a mark 
of the temper of the age. The lavishness of a new wealth united 
with a lavishness of life, a love of beauty, of colour, of display, to 
revolutionize English dress. The Queen's three thousand robes were 
rivalled in their bravery by the slashed velvets, the ruffs, the jewelled 
purpoints of the courtiers around her. Men "wore a manor on their 
backs." The old sober notions of thrift melted before the strange 
revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants gambled 
away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one 
in the Indies. Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls 
and diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all 
was of gold, threw a haze of prodigality and profusion over the 
imagination of the meanest seaman. The wonders, too, of the New 
Warld kindled a burst of extravagant fancy in the Old. The strange 



390 



iriSTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



medley of past and present which distinguishes its masques and feast- 
ings only reflected the medley of men's thoughts. Pedantry, novelty, 
the allegory of Italy, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the mythology of 
Rome, the English bear-fight, pastorals, superstition, farce, all took 
their turn in the entertainment which Lord Leicester provided for the 
Queen at Kenilworth. A " wild man'' from the Indies chanted her 
praises, and Echo answered him. Elizabeth turned from the greetings 
of sibyls and giants to deliver the enchanted lady from her tyrant 
" Sans Pitie." Shepherdesses welcomed her with carols of the spring, 
while Ceres and Bacchus poured their corn and grapes at her feet. 

It was to this turmoil of men's minds, this wayward luxuriance and 
prodigality of fancy, that we owe the revival of English letters under * 
Elizabeth. Here, as elsewhere, the Renascence found vernacular 
literature all but dead, poetry reduced to the doggrelof Skelton, history 
to the annals of Fabyan or Hall ; and the overpowering influence of 
the new models, both of thought and style, which it gave to the 
world in the writers of Greece and Rome, was at first felt only as a 
fresh check to the dreams of any revival of English poetry or prose. 
Though England, indeed, shared more than any European country in 
the political and ecclesiastical results of the New Learning, in mere 
literary results it stood far behind the rest of Europe — Italy, or 
Germany, or France. More alone ranks among the great classical 
scholars of the sixteenth century. Classical learning, indeed, all but 
perished at the Universities in the storm of the Reformation, nor did 
it revive there till the close of Elizabeth's reign. Insensibly, however, 
the influences of the Renascence were fertilizing the intellectual soil 
of England for the rich harvest that was to come. The growth of the 
grammar schools was realizing the dream of Sir Thomas More, and 
bringing the middle-classes, from the squire to the petty tradesman, 
into contact with the masters of Greece and Rome. The love of 
travel, which became so remarkable a characteristic of Elizabeth's 
day, quickened the intelligence of the wealthier nobles. " Home- 
keeping youths," says Shakspere in words that mark the time, " have 
ever homely wits," and a tour over the Continent was just becoming 
part of the education of a gentleman. Fairfax's version of Tasso, 
Harrington's version of Ariosto, were signs of the influence which 
the literature of Italy, the land to which travel led most frequently, 
exerted on English minds. The writers of Greece and Rome began 
at last to tell upon England when they were popularized by a crowd 
of translations. Chapman's noble version of Homer stands high, 
above its fellows, but all the greater poets and historians of thel 
classical world were turned into English before the close of the six- ■ 
teenth century. It is characteristic, perhaps, of England that his- 
torical hterature was the first to rise from its long death, though the 
form in which it rose marked forcibly the difference between the 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



391 



world in which it had perished and that in which it re-appeared. 
During the Middle Ages the world had been without a past, save the 
shadowy and unknown past of early Rome ; and annalist and 
chronicler told the story of the years which went before, as a 
preface to his tale of the present, but without a sense of any differ- 
ence between them. But the great religious, social, and political 
change which had passed over England under the New Monarchy 
had broken the continuity of its life ; and the depth of the rift between 
the two ages is seen by the way in which History passes on its 
revival under Elizabeth from the mediaeval form of pure narrative 
to its modern form of an investigation and reconstruction of the past. 
The new interest which attached to the bygone world led to the 
collection of its annals, their reprinting, and embodiment in an 
English shape. It was his desire to give the Elizabethan Church 
a basis in the past, as much as any pure zeal for letters, which 
induced Archbishop Parker to lead the way in the first of these 
labours. The collection of historical manuscripts which, following 
in the track of Leland, he rescued from the wreck of the monastic 
libraries, created a school of antiquarian imitators, whose research 
and industry has preserved for us almost every work of permanent 
historical value which existed before the Dissolution of the Monas- 
teries. To his publication of some of our earlier chronicles we owe 
the series of similar publications which bear the name of Camden, 
Twysden, and Gale, and which are now receiving their completion in 
the works issued by the Master of the Rolls. But as a branch of 
literature, English History in the new shape which we have noted 
began in the work of the poet Daniel. The chronicles of Stowe 
and Speed, who preceded him, are simple records of the past, 
often copied almost literally from the annals they used, and utterly 
without style or arrangement ; while Daniel, inaccurate and superficial 
as he is, gave his story a literary form and embodied it in a pure and 
graceful prose. Two larger works at the close of Elizabeth^s reign, 
the " History of the Turks " by Knolles and Raleigh's vast but un- 
finished plan of the " History of the World," showed the widening 
of historic interest beyond the merely national bounds to which it 
had hitherto been confined. 

A far higher development of our literature sprang from the growing 
influence which Italy, as we have seen, was exerting, partly through 
travel and partly through its poetry and romances, on the manners and 
taste of the time. Men made more account of a story of Boccaccio's, 
it was said, than a story from the Bible. The dress, the speech, the 
manners of Italy became objects of almost passionate imitation, and 
of an imitation not alv/ays of the wisest or noblest kind. To Ascham 
it seemed like "the enchantment of Circe brought out of Italy to 
mar men's manners in England." " An Italianate Englishmen/' ran 



392 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the harder proverb of Italy itself, "is an incarnate devil." The literary 
form which this imitation took seemed at any rate absolutely absurd. 
John Lyly, distinguished both as a dramatist and a poet, laid aside 
the very tradition of English style for a style modelled on the 
decadence of Italian prose. Euphuism, as the new fashion has been 
styled from the prose romance of Euphues in which Lyly originated 
it, is best known to modern readers by the pitiless caricature with 
which Shakspere quizzed its pedantry, its affectation, the meaningless 
monotony of its far-fetched phrases, the absurdity of its extravagant 
conceits. Its representative, Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," is " a 
man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight," " that hath a mint 
of phrases in his brain ; one whom the music of his own vain tongue 
doth ravish like enchanting harmony." But its very extravagance 
sprang from the general burst of delight in the new resources of 
thought and language which literature felt to be at its disposal ; and 
the new sense of literary beauty which its affectation, its love of a 
" mint of phrases " and the " music of its ever vain tongue " discloses, 
the new sense of pleasure in delicacy or grandeur of phrase, in the 
structure and arrangement of sentences, in what has been termed 
the atmosphere of words, was a sense out of which style was itselt 
to spring. For a time, Euphuism had it all its own way. Elizabeth 
was the most affected and detestable of Euphuists ; and " that 
beauty in Court which could not parley Euphuism," a courtier ot 
Charles the First's time tells us, " was as little regarded as she 
that now there speaks not French." The fashion, however, passed 
away, but the "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney shows the wonderful 
advance which prose had made. Sidney, the nephew of Lord 
Leicester, was the idol of his time, and perhaps no figure reflects 
the age more fully and more beautifully. Fair as he was brave, 
quick of wit as of affection, noble and generous in temper, dear 
to Elizabeth as to Spenser, the darling of the Court and of the 
camp, his learning and his genius made him the centre of the 
literary world which was springing into birth on English soil. He 
had travelled in France and Italy, he was master alike of the older 
learning and of the new discoveries of astronomy. Bruno dedicated 
to him as to a friend his metaphysical speculations ; he was familiar 
with the^^ drama of Spain, the poems of Ronsard, the sonnets ot 
Italy. ^He combined the wisdom of a grave councillor with the 
romantic chivalry of a knight-errant. "~*^ I never heard the old story 
of Percy and Douglas," he says, " that I found not my heart moved 
more than with a trumpet." He flung away his life to save the 
English army in Flanders, and as he lay dying they brought a cup ot 
water to his fevered lips. Sidney bade them give it to a soldier who 
was stretched on the ground beside him. " Thy necessity," he said, 
"is greater than mine." The whole of Sidney's nature, his chivalry and 



,VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



393 



his learning, his thirst for adventures, his tendency to extravagance, his 
freshness of tone, his tenderness and childlike simplicity of heart, his 
affectation and false sentiment, his keen sense of pleasure and delight, 
pours itself out in the pastoral medley, forced, tedious, and yet strangely 
beautiful, of his " Arcadia." In his " Defence of Poetry " the youthful 
exuberance of the romancer has passed into the earnest vigour and 
grandiose stateliness of the rhetorician. But whether in the one 
work or the other, the flexibility, the music, the luminous clearness 
of Sidney's style remains the same. But the quickness and vivacity 
of English prose was first developed in the school of Italian imitators 
who appeared in Elizabeth^s later years. The origin of English 
fiction is to be found in the tales and romances with which Greene 
and Nash crowded the market, models for which they found in 
the Italian novels. The brief form of these novelettes soon led 
to the appearance of the " pamphlet ; '' and a new world of readers 
was seen in the rapidity with which the stories or scurrilous libels 
which passed under this name were issued, and the greediness with 
which they were devoured. It was the boast of Greene that in 
the eight years before his death he had produced forty pamphlets. 
^' In a night or a day would he have yarked up a pamphlet, as well as 
in seven years, and glad was that printer that might be blest to pay 
him dear for the very dregs of his wit.'^ Modern eyes see less 
of the wit than of the dregs in the works of Greene and his com- 
peers ; but the attacks which Nash directed against the Puritans 
and his rivals were the first English works which shook utterly off 
the pedantry and extravagance of Euphuism. In his lightness, his 
facility, his vivacity, his directness of speech, we have the beginning 
of popular literature. It had descended from the closet to the street, 
and the very change implied that the street was ready to receive it. 
The abundance, indeed, of printers and of printed books at the close 
of the Queen's reign, shows that the world of readers and writers 
had widened far beyond the small circle of scholars and courtiers 
with which it began. 

We shall have to review at a later time the great poetic burst for 
which this intellectual advance was paving the way, and the moral 
and religious change which was passing over the country through the 
progress of Puritanism. But both the intellectual and the religious 
impulse of the age united with the influence of its growing wealth to 
revive a spirit of independence in the nation at large, a spirit which 
it was impossible for Elizabeth to understand, but the strength of 
which her wonderful tact enabled her to feel. Long before any open 
conflict arose between the people and the Crown, we see her instinc- 
tive perception of the change around her in the modifications, con- 
scious or unconscious, which she introduced into the system of the 
New Monarchy. Of its usurpations on English liberty she abandoned 



Sec. v. 



The 

England 



Elizabeth 
1590. 



Eliza- 
be than 
England 
and tbe 



394 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



none, but she curtailed and softened down almost all. She tampered, 
as her predecessors had tampered, with personal freedom ; there was 
the same straining of statutes and coercion of juries in political trials 
as before, and an arbitrary power of imprisonment was still exercised 
by the Council. The duties she imposed on cloth an4 sweet wines 
were an assertion of her right of arbitrary taxation, ^oyal procla- 
mations constantly assumed the force of law. In one part of her 
policy indeed Elizabeth seemed to fall resolutely back from the 
constitutional attitude assumed by the Tudor sovereigns. Ever since 
Cromwell's time the Parliament had been convened almost year by 
year as a great engine of justice and legislation, but Elizabeth 
recurred to the older jealousy of the two Houses which had been 
entertained by Edward the Fourth, Henry the Seventh, and Wolsey. 
Her Parliaments were summoned at intervals of never less than 
three, and sometimes of nine years, and never save on urgent 
necessity. Practically however the Royal power was wielded with a 
caution and moderation that showed the sense of a gathering difficulty 
in the full exercise of it. The ordinary course of justice was left 
undisturbed. The jurisdiction of the Council was asserted almost 
exclusively over the Catholics ; and defended, in their case, as a 
precaution against pressing dangers. The proclamations issued were 
temporary in character and of small importance, f The two duties 
imposed were so slight as to pass almost unnoticed in the general 
satisfaction at Elizabeth's abstinence from internal taxation. The 
benevolences and forced loans which brought home the sense of 
tyranny to the subjects of her predecessors were absolutely aban- 
doned. She treated the Privy Seals, which on emergencies she issued 
for advances to her Exchequer, simply as anticipations of her revenue 
(like our own Exchequer Bills), and punctually repaid them. The 
monopolies with which she fettered trade proved a more serious griev- 
ance ; but during her earlier reign they were looked on as a part of the 
system of Merchant Associations, which were at that time regarded 
as necessary for the regulation and protection of the growing com- 
merce. ; Her thrift enabled her to defray the current expenses of the 
Crown from its ordinary revenues. But the thrift was dictated, not 
so much by economy, as by the desire to avoid any summoning of 
Parliament. The Queen saw that the "management" of the two 
Houses, so easy to Cromwell, was becoming more difficult every day. 
The rise of a new nobility, enriched by the spoils of the Church and 
trained to political life among the perils of the religious changes, 
had given a fresh vigour to the Lords. A curious proof of the 
increased wealth of the country gentry, as well as of their increased 
desire to obtain a seat in the Commons, was shown by the cessation 
at this time of the old practice of payment of members by their con- 
stituencies. A change too in the borough representation, which had 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



39$ 



long been in progress, but was now for the first time legally recog- 
nized, tended greatly to increase the vigour and independence of the 
Lower House. The members for boroughs had been required by the 
teiiiis of the older writs to be chosen among their burgesses ; and an 
Act of Henry the Fifth gave this custom the force of law. But the 
passing of the Act shows that it was already widely infringed ; and by 
the time of Elizabeth most borough seats were filled by strangers, 
often nominees of the great landowners round, but for the most part 
men of wealth and blood, whose aim in entering Parliament was a 
purely political one. So changed, indeed, was the tone of the Com- 
mons, even as early as the close of Henry's reign, that Edward and 
Mary both fell back on the prerogative of the Crown to create 
boroughs, and summoned members from fresh constituencies, which 
were often mere villages, and wholly in the hands of the Crown. 
But this "packing of the House" had still to be continued by their 
successor. The large number of such members whom Elizabeth 
called into the Commons, sixty-two in all, was a proof of the increas- 
ing difiiculty which was now experienced by the Government in 
securing a working majority. 

Had Elizabeth lived in quiet times her thrift would have saved 
her from the need of summoning Parliament at all. But the perils 
of her reign drove her at rare intervals to the demand of a sub- 
sidy, and each demand of a subsidy forced her to assemble the 
Houses. Constitutionally the policy of Cromwell had had this special 
advantage, that at ^he very crisis of our liberties it had acknow- 
ledged and confirmed by repeated instances, for its own purposes of 
arbitrary rule, the traditional right of Parliament to grant subsidies, 
to enact laws, and to consider and petition for the redress of griev- 
ances. These rights remained, while the power which had turned 
them into a mere engine of despotism was growing weaker year by 
year. Not only did the Parliament of Elizabeth put its powers in 
force as fully as the Parliament of Cromwell, but the historical 
tendency which we have noticed, the tendency of the age to fail back 
on former times for precedents, soon led to a reclaiming of privileges 
which had died away under the New Monarchy. During the reign of 
Elizabeth the House of Commons gradually succeeded in protecting 
its members from all arrest during its sessions, save by permission of 
the House itself, and won the rights of punishing and expelling mem- 
ber for crimes committed within the House, and of determining all mat- 
ters relating to their election. The more important claim of freedom of 
speech brought on a series of petty conflicts which showed Elizabeth's 
instincts of despotism, as well as her sense of the new power which 
despotism had to face. In the great crisis of the Darnley marriage Mr. 
Dutton defied a Royal prohibition to mention the subject of the succes- 
sion by a hot denunciation of the Scottish claim. EHzabeth at once 



The 
England 

OF 

Elizabeth. 



396 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ordered him into aiTest, but the Commons prayed for leave "to 
confer upon their liberties," and the Queen ordered his release. In 
the same spirit she commanded Mr. Strickland, the mover of a bill 
for the reform of the Common Prayer, to appear no more in Parlia- 
ment ; but as soon as she perceived that the temper of the Comm.ons 
was bent upon his restoration the command was withdrawn. On the 
other hand, the Commons still shrank from any violent defiance of 
Elizabeth's assumption of control over freedom of speech. The bold 
protest of a Puritan member, Peter Wentworth, against it was met by 
the House itself with a committal to the Tower : and the yet bolder 
questions which he addressed to a later Parliament, "whether this 
Council is not a place for every member of the same freely and 
without control, by bill or speech, to utter any of the griefs of the 
Commonwealth ? '' brought on him a fresh imprisonment at the hands 
of the Council, which lasted till the dissolution of the Parliament, and 
with which the Commons declined to interfere. But while vacillating 
in its assertion of the rights of individual speakers, the House steadily 
claimed for itself the right to consider three cardinal subjects, the 
treatment of which had been regarded by every Tudor sovereign 
as lying exclusively within the competence of the Crown. " Matters 
of State," as the higher political questions of the time were called, 
were jealously reserved for the Royal cognizance alone ; but the 
question of the Succession became too vital to English freedom and 
English religion to remain confined within Elizabeth's council chamber. 
At the opening of her reign the Commons humbly petitioned for the 
declaration of a successor and for the Queen's marriage ; and in spite 
of her rebuke and evasive answers, both Houses on their meeting four 
years after joined in the same demand. Her consciousness of the 
real dangers of such a request united with her arbitrary temper to 
move Elizabeth to a burst of passionate anger. The marriage indeed 
she promised, but she peremptorily forbade the subject of the succes- 
sion to be approached. Wentworth at once rose in the Commons 
to know wheher such a prohibition was not " against the liberties of 
Parliament ? " and the question was followed by a hot debate. A fresh 
message from the Queen commanded " that there should be no further 
argument," but the message was met by a request for freedom of deli- 
beration. EHzabeth's prudence taught her that retreat was necessary- ; 
she protested that " she did not mean to prejudice any part of the 
liberties heretofore granted to them ; " she softened the order of silence 
into a request ; and the Commons, won by the graceful concession to 
a loyal assent, received her message "most joyfully and with most 
hearty prayers and thanks for the same.'' But the victory was none 
the less a real one. No such struggle had taken place between the -j 
Commons and the Crown since the beginning of the New Monarchy, || 
and the struggle had ended in the virtual defeat of the Crown. It 



VII.] 



THE RE FORM A TION, 



39/ 



was the prelude to a claim yet more galling to Elizabeth. Like the 
rest of the Tudor sovereigns, she held her ecclesiastical supremacy 
to be a purely personal power, with her administration of which 
neither Parliament nor even her Council had any right to interfere. 
But the exclusion of the Catholic gentry through the Test Acts, and 
the growth of Puritanism among the landowners as a class, gave more 
and more a Protestant tone to the Commons ; and it was easy to 
remember that the Supremacy which was thus jealously guarded from 
Parliamentary interference had been conferred on the Crown by a 
Parliamentary statute. Here, however, the Queen, as the religious repre- 
sentative of the two parties who made up her subjects, stood on firmer 
ground than the Commons, who represented but one of them. And 
she used her advantage boldly. The bills proposed by the Puritans 
for the reform of the Common Prayer were at her command dehvered 
up into her hands and suppressed. Wentworth, the most outspoken 
of his party, was, as we have seen, imprisoned in the Tower : and in 
a later Parliament the Speaker was expressly forbidden to receive 
bills "for reforming the Church, and transforming the Common- 
wealth." In spite of these obstacles, however, the effort for reform 
continued, and though crushed by the Crown or set aside by the 
Lords, ecclesiastical bills were presented in every Parliament. A 
better fortune awaited the Commons in their attack on the Royal 
prerogative in matters of trade. Complaints made of the licenses 
and monopolies, by which internal and external commerce were 
fettered, were at first repressed by a Royal reprimand as matters 
neither pertaining to the Commons nor within the compass of their 
understanding. When the subject was again stirred, nearly twenty 
years afterwards. Sir Edward Hoby was sharply rebuked by " a great 
personage" for his complaint of the illegal exactions made by the 
Exchequer. But the bill which he promoted was sent up to the 
Lords in spite of this, and at the close of Elizabeth's reign the 
storm of popular indignation which had been roused by the growing 
grievance nerved the Commons to a decisive struggle. It was in vain 
that the ministers opposed the bill for the Abolition of Monopolies, 
and after four days of vehement debate the tact of Elizabeth taught 
her to give way. She acted with her usual ability, declared her 
previous ignorance of the existence of the evil, thanked the House for 
its interference, and quashed at a single blow every monopoly that | 
she had granted. 



398 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Section VI.— The Armada. 1572—1588. 

[Authorities. — As before for the general history of this reign. The state 
of the Catholics is described by Lingard (" History of England "), and the 
religious policy of Elizabeth criticised with remarkable fairness by Hallam 
(" Constitutional History " ).] 



The wonderful growth in wealth and social energy which we have 
described was accompanied by a remarkable change in the religious 
temper of the nation. It was in the years which we are traversino- 
that England became firmly Protestant. The quiet decay of the tra- 
ditionary Catholicism which formed the religion of three-fourths of the 
people at Elizabeth's accession is shown by the steady diminution in 
the number of recusants throughout her reign ; and at its close the only 
parts of England where the old faith retained anything of its former 
vigour were the north and the extreme west, at that time the poorest 
and least populated parts of the kingdom. The main cause of the 
change lay undoubtedly in the gradual dying out of the Catholic 
priesthood, and the growth of a new Protestant clergy who supplied 
their place. The older parish priests, though they had almost to a 
man acquiesced in the changes of ritual and doctrine which the 
various phases of the Reformation imposed upon them, remained in 
heart utterly hostile to its spirit. As Mary had undone the changes 
of Edward, they hoped for a Catholic successor to undo the changes 
of Elizabeth ; and in the meantime they were content to wear the 
surplice instead of the chasuble, and to use the Communion office 
instead of the Mass-book. But if they were forced to read the 
Homilies from the pulpit, the spirit of their teaching remained un- 
changed ; and it was easy for them to cast contempt on the new 
services, till they seemed to old-fashioned worshippers a mere " Christ- 
mas game." But the lapse of twenty years did its work in emptying 
parsonage after parsonage, and the jealous supervision of Parker and 
the bishops ensured an inner as well as an outer conformity to the 
established faith in the clergy who took the place of the dying priest- 
hood. The new parsons were for the most part not merely Protestant 
in belief and teaching, but ultra- Protestant. The old restrictions on 
the use of the pulpit were silently removed as the need for them past 
away, and the zeal of the young ministers showed itself in an 
assiduous preaching which moulded in their own fashion the religious 
ideas of the new generation. But their character had even a greater 
influence than their preaching. Under Henry the priests had for 
the most part been ignorant and sensual men ; and the character of 
the clergy appointed by the greedy Protestants of Edward's reign 
I was even worse than that of their Popish rivals. But the energy 
j ot the Primate, seconded as it was by the general increase of zeal 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



399 



and morality at the time, did its work ; and by the close of Elizabeth's 
reign the moral temper as well as the social character of the clergy 
had wholly changed. Scholars like Hooker, gentlemen like George 
Herbert, could now be found in the ranks of the priesthood, and the 
grosser scandals which had disgraced the clergy as a body for the 
most part disappeared. It was impossible for a Puritan libeller to 
bring against the ministers of Elizabeth's reign the charges of 
drunkenness and immorality which Protestant libellers had been able 
to bring against the priesthood of Henry's. But the influence of 
the new clergy was backed by a general revolution in English thought. 
We have already watched the first upgrowth of the new literature 
which was to find its highest types in Shakspere and Bacon. The 
grammar schools were diffusing a new knowledge and mental energy 
through the middle classes and among the country gentry. The 
tone of the Universities, no unfair test of the tone of the nation at 
large, changed wholly as the Queen's reign went on. At its opening 
Oxford was a nest of Papists, and sent its best scholars to feed the 
Catholic seminaries. At its close the University was a hot-bed of 
Puritanism, where the fiercest tenets of Calvin reigned supreme. The 
movement was no doubt hastened by the political circumstances of the 
time. Under the rule of Elizabeth loyalty became more and more 
a passion among Englishmen ; and the Bull of Deposition placed Rome 
in the forefront of Elizabeth's foes. The conspiracies which festered 
around Mary were laid to the Pope's charge ; he was known to be 
pressing on France and on Spain the invasion and conquest of the 
heretic kingdom ; he was soon to bless the Armada. Every day made 
it harder for a Catholic to reconcile Catholicism with loyalty to his 
(2ueen or devotion to his country ; and the mass of men, who are 
moved by sentiment rather than by reason, swung slowly round to the 
side which, \vhatever its religious significance might be, was the side 
of patriotism, of liberty against tyranny, of England against Spain. 
Whatever fire and energy was wanting to the new movement, was 
given at last by the atrocities which marked the Catholic triumph 
on the other side of the Channel. The horror of Alva's butcheries, or 
of the Massacre on St. Bartholomew's day, revived the memories of 
the bloodshed under Mary. The tale of Protestant sufferings was told 
with a wonderful pathos and picturesqueness by John Foxe, an exile 
during the persecution ; and his " Book of Martyrs," which had been 
set up by Royal order in the churches for public reading, passed 
from the churches to the shelves of every English household. The 
trading classes of the towns had been the first to embrace the 
doctrines of the Reformation, but their Protestantism became a passion 
as the refugees of the Continent brought to shop and market their tale 
of outrage and blood. Thousands of Flemish exiles found a refuge in 
the Cinque Ports, a third of the Antwerp merchants were seen pacing 



40O 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the new London Exchange, and a Church of French Huguenots 
found a home which it still retains in the crypt of Canterbury 
Cathedral. 

In her ecclesiastical policy Elizabeth trusted mainly to time ; and 
time, as we have seen, justified her trust. Her system of com- 
promise both in faith and worship, of quietly replacing the old priest- 
hood as it died out by Protestant ministers, of wearying recusants into 
at least outer conformity with the state-religion and attendance on 
the state-services by fines — a policy aided, no doubt, by the moral 
influences we have described — was gradually bringing England round 
to a new religious front. But the decay of Catholicism appealed 
strongly to the new spirit of Catholic zeal which, in its despair of aid 
from Catholic princes, was now girding itself for its own bitter struggle 
with heresy. Dr. Allen, a scholar who had been driven from Oxford 
by the test prescribed in the Act of Uniformity, had foreseen the results 
of the dying out of the Marian priests, and had set up a seminary at 
Douay to supply their place. The new college, liberally supported 
by the Catholic peers and supplied with pupils by a stream of refugees 
from Oxford, soon landed its "seminary priests" on English shores ; 
and few as they were at first, their presence was at once felt in the 
check which it gave to the gradual reconciliation of the Catholic 
gentry to the English Church. No check could have been more 
galling to Elizabeth, and her resentment was quickened by the sense 
of a fresh danger. She had accepted from the first the issue of the 
Bull of Deposition as a declaration of war on the part of Rome, and 
she viewed the Douay priests simply as political emissaries of the 
Papacy. The comparative security of the Catholics from active per- 
secution during the early part of her reign had arisen, as we have 
seen, partly from the sympathy and connivance of the gentry who 
acted as justices of the peace, but still more from her own religious 
indifference. But the Test Act placed the magistracy in Protestant 
hands; and as Elizabeth passed from indifference to suspicion, and 
from suspicion to terror, she no longer chose to restrain the bigotry 
around her. In quitting Eaton Hall, which she had visited in one 
of her pilgrimages, the Queen gave its master, young Rookwood, 
thanks for his entertainment and her hand to kiss. " But my Lord 
Chamberlain nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was ex- 
communicate " for non-attendance at church, " called him before him, 
demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her royal presence, he 
unfit to accompany any Christian person, forthwith said that he was 
fitter for a pair of stocks, commanded him out of Court, and yet to 
attend the Council's pleasure.'' The Council's pleasure was seen in 
his committal to the town prison at Norwich, while "seven more 
gentlemen of worship" were fortunate enough to escape with a simple 
sentence of arrest at their own homes. The Queen's terror became, 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



401 



m fact, a panic in the nation at large. The few priests who landed 
from Douay were multiplied into an army of Papal emissaries, de- 
spatched to sow treason and revolt throughout the land. The Parlia- 
ment, which had now through the working of the Test Act become 
a wholly Protestant body, save for the presence of a few Catholics 
among the peers, was summoned to meet the new danger, and declared 
the landing of the priests and the harbouring of them to be treason. 
The Act proved no idle menace ; and the execution of Cuthbert Mayne, 
a young priest who was arrested in Cornwall, gave a terrible indication 
of the character of the struggle upon which Elizabeth was about to 
enter. She shrank, indeed, from the charge of religious persecution ; 
she boasted of her abstinence from any interference with men^s con- 
sciences ; and Cecil, in his official defence of her policy, while declar- 
ing freedom of worship to be incompatible with religious order, boldly 
asserted the right of every English subject to perfect freedom of 
religious opinion. To modern eyes there is something even more 
revolting than open persecution in the policy which branded every 
Catholic priest as a traitor, and all Catholic worship as disloyalty ; 
but the first step towards toleration was won when the Queen rested 
her system of repression on purely poHtical grounds. Elizabeth was 
a persecutor, but she was the first English ruler who felt the charge 
of religious persecution to be a stigma on her rule ; the first who" 
distinctly disclaimed religious differences as a ground for putting men 
to death. It is fair, too, to acknowledge that there was a real political 
danger in the new missionaries. The efforts of the seminary priests 
were succeeded by those of a body whose existence was a standing 
threat to every Protestant throne. A large number of the Oxford 
refugees at Douay joined the order of the Jesuits, whose members 
were already famous for their blind devotion to the will and judgments 
of Rome ; and the two ablest and most eloquent of these exiles, 
Campian, once a fellow of St. John's, and Parsons, once a fellow of 
Balliol, were selected as the heads of a Jesuit mission in England. 
For the moment their success was amazing. The eagerness shown to 
hear Campian was so great, that in spite of the denunciations of the 
Government, he was able to preach with hardly a show of concealment 
to a vast audience in Smithfield. From London the missionaries 
wandered in the disguise of captains or serving-men, or sometimes 
in the cassock of the English clergy, through many of the counties ; 
and wherever they went the zeal of the Catholic gentry revived. The 
list of nobles reconciled to the old faith by the wandering apostles 
was headed by the name of Lord Oxford, Burghley's own son-in-law, 
and the proudest among English peers. The success of the Jesuits in 
undoing Elizabeth's work of compromise was shown in a more public 
way by the unanimity with which the Catholics withdrew from attend- 
ance at the national worship. As in the case of the seminary priests, 

D D 



402 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 
The 

AUMADA. 

1572- 
1588. 



1581. 



Elisabeth 

and 

PMlip. 



however, the panic of the Protestants and of the Parhament far out- 
ran the greatness of the danger. The Httle group of missionaries was 
magnified by popular fancy into a host of disguised Jesuits ; and the 
imaginary invasion was met by statutes which prohibited the saying of 
Mass even in private houses, increased the fine on recusants to twenty 
pounds a month, and enacted that "all persons pretending to any 
powei of absolving subjects from their allegiance, or practising to 
withdraw them to the Romish religion, with all persons after the 
present session willingly so absolved or reconciled to the See of Rome, J 
shall be guilty of High Treason." The way in which the vast powers \ 
conferred on the Crown by this statute were used by Elizabeth was 
not only characteristic in itself, but important as at once defining the 
poHcy to which, in theory at least, her successors adhered for more 
than a hundred years. No layman was brought to the bar or to the 
block under its provisions. The oppression of the Catholic gentry 
was limited to an exaction, more or less rigorous at different times, of 
the fines for recusancy or non-attendance at public worship. The 
work of bloodshed was reserved wholly for priests, and under Elizabeth 
this work was done with a ruthless energy which for the moment- 
crushed the Catholic reaction. The Jesuits were tracked by Wal- 
singham's spies, dragged from their hiding-places, and sent in batches 
to the Towner. So hot was the pursuit that Parsons was forced 
to fly across the Channel ; while Campian was brought a prisoner 
through the streets of London, amidst the howling of the mob, and 
placed at the bar on the charge of treason. " Our religion only is 
our Clime," was a plea which galled his judges ; but the political danger 
of the Jesuit preaching was disclosed in his evasion of any direct 
reply, when questioned as to his belief in the validity of the excommu- 
nication and deposition of the Queen by the Papal See. The death of 
Campian was the prelude to a steady, pitiless effort at the extermina- 
tion of his class. If we adopt the Catholic estimate of the time, the 
tw^enty years which followed saw the execution of two hundred priests, 
while a yet greater number perished in the filthy and fever-stricken 
gaols into which they were plunged. The work of reconciliation to 
Rome was arrested by this ruthless energy; but, on the other hand, 
the work which the priests had effected could not be undone. The 
system of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which Elizabeth had 
trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled ; and the 
English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of national danger, 
and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were 
severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church. 

But the effect of this bloodshed on the world without was far more 
violent, and productive of wider and greater results. The torture and 
1 death of the Jesuit martyrs sent a thrill of horror through the whole 
I Catholic Church, and roused at last into action the sluggish hostility 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION, 



403 



of Spain. Spain was at this moment the mightiest of European 
powers. The discoveries of Columbus had given it the New World 
of the west ; the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro poured into its 
treasury the plunder of Mexico and Peru ; its galleons brought the 
rich produce of the Indies, their gold, their jewels, their ingots of 
silver, to the harbour of Cadiz. To the New World its King added 
the fairest and wealthiest portions of the Old ; he was master of 
Naples and Milan — the richest and the most fertile districts of Italy, 
of the busy provinces of the Low Countries, of Flanders — the great 
manufacturing district of the time, and of Antwerp, which had become 
the central mart for the commerce of the world. His native kingdom, 
poor as it was, supplied him with the steadiest and the most daring 
soldiers that the world had seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. 
The renown of the Spanish infantry had been growing from the day 
when it flung off the onset of the French chivalry on the field of 
Ravenna ; and the Spanish generals stood without rivals in their 
military skill, as they stood without rivals in their ruthless cruelty. 
The whole, too, of this enormous power was massed in the hands 
of a single man. Served as he was by able statesmen and subtle 
diplomatists, Philip of Spain was his own sole minister ; labour- 
ing day after day, like a clerk, through the long years of his reign, 
amidst the papers which crowded his closet ; but resolute to let 
nothing pass without his supervision, and to suffer nothing to be 
done save by his express command. It was his boast that every- 
where in the vast compass of his dominions he was " an absolute 
King." It was to realize this idea of absolutism that he crushed the 
liberties of Arragon, as his father had crushed the hberties of Castile, 
and sent Alva to tread under foot the constitutional freedom of the 
Low Countries. His bigotry went hand in hand with his thirst for 
power. Italy and Spain lay hushed beneath the terror of the Inquisi- 
tion, while Flanders was being purged of heresy by the stake and the 
sword. The shadow of this gigantic power fell like a deadly blight 
over Europe. The new Protestantism, like the new spirit of political 
liberty, saw its real foe in Philip. It was Spain, rather than the 
Guises, against which Coligni and the Huguenots struggled in vain ; 
it was SpaiQ with which William of Orange was wrestling for rehgious 
and civil freedom ; it was Spain which was soon to plunge Geniiany 
into the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, and to which the Catholic 
world had for twenty years been looking, and looking in vain, for 
a victory over heresy in England. Vast, in fact, as Philip's resources 
were, they were drained by the yet vaster schemes of ambition into 
which his religion and his greed of power, as well as the wide dis- 
tribution of his dominions, perpetually drew him. To coerce the 
weaker States of Italy, to preserve a commanding influence in Ger- 
many, to support CathoHcism in France, to crush heresy in Flanders, 

D D 2 



404 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



to despatch one Armada against the Turk and another against 
Elizabeth, were aims mighty enough to exhaust even the power 
of the Spanish Monarchy. But it was rather on the character of 
Phihp than on the exhaustion of his treasury that EHzabeth counted 
for success in the struggle which had so long been going on between 
them. The King's temper was slow, cautious even to timidity, losing 
itself continually in delays, in hesitations, in anticipating remote perils, 
in waiting for distant chances ; and on the slowness and hesitation 
of his temper his rival had been playing ever since she mounted the 
throne. The diplomatic contest between the two was like the fight 
which England was soon to see between the ponderous Spanish 
galleon and the light pinnace of the buccaneers. The agility, the 
sudden changes of Elizabeth, her lies, her mystifications, though they 
failed to deceive Philip, puzzled and impeded his mind. But amidst 
all this cloud of intrigue the Queen's course had in reality been 
simple. In her earher days France rivalled Spain in its greatness, 
and Elizabeth simply played the two rivals off against one another. 
She hindered France from giving effective aid to Mary Stuart by 
threats of an alliance with Spain ; while she induced Philip to wink at 
her heresy, and to discourage the risings of the English Catholics, by 
playing on his dread of her alliance with France. But the tide of 
religious passion which had so long been held in check broke at last 
over its banks, and the political face of Europe was instantly changed. 
The Low Countries, driven to despair by the greed and persecution of 
Alva, rose in a revolt which after strange alternations of fortune 
gave to Europe the Republic of the United Provinces. The opening 
which their rising afforded to the ambition of France was at once 
seized by Coligni and the French Protestants, and used as a political 
engine to break the power which the Queen-mother Mary of Medicis 
exercised over Charles the Ninth. Charles was on the point of surren- 
dering himself to ambition and the Huguenots, when Mary in revenge, 
or with the blind instinct of self-preservation, flung aside her old policy 
of balancing the two parties against one another. She threw herself 
on the side of the Guises, and ensured their triumph by lending herself 
to their massacre of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew's day. But 
though the long gathering clouds of religious hatred had broken, 
EHzabeth trusted to her dexterity to keep out of the storm. If 
France, torn with civil strife, had ceased to be a balance to Spain, she 
found a new balance in Flanders. Whatever enthusiasm the heroic 
struggle of the Prince of Orange excited among her subjects, it failed 
to move Elizabeth even for an instant from the path of cold self- 
interest. To her the revolt of the Netherlands was simply " a bridle 
of Spain, which kept war out of our own gate." At the darkest 
moment of the contest, Vv^hen even William of Orange dreamed of aban- 
i doning ail, and seeking in far-off seas a new home for liberty, the . 



A 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATIO!^. 



405 



Queen bent her energies to prevent him from finding succour in France. 
That the Provinces could in the end withstand Phihp, neither she 
nor any English statesmen believed. They held that the struggle must 
close either in utter subjection of the Netherlands, or in their selling 
themselves for aid to France ; and the accession of power which 
either result must give to one of her two Catholic foes the Queen 
was eager to avert. Her plan for averting it was by forcing the 
Provinces to accept the terms offered by Spain — a restoration, that is, 
of their constitutional privileges, accompanied by their submission to 
che Church. Peace on such a footing would not only restore English 
commerce, which suffered from the war ; it would leave Flanders still 
formidable as a weapon against Philip. The freedom of the Provinces 
would be saved — and the religious question involved in a fresh sub- 
mission to the yoke of Catholicism was one which Elizabeth was 
incapable of appreciating. To her the steady refusal of William the 
Silent to sacrifice his faith was as unintelligible as the steady bigotry 
of Philip in demanding such a sacrifice. It was of more immediate 
consequence that Philip's anxiety to avoid provoking an intervention 
on the part of England, which would destroy all hope of his success 
in Flanders, left her tranquil at home. Mary Stuart saw her hope 
of foreign aid disappear, at a time when the death of Norfolk and 
Northumberland removed the dread of civil war. At no moment 
had the Queen felt so s-ecure against a blow from Phihp as when 
Philip at last was forced to deliver his blow. 

The control of events was, in fact, passing from the hands of states- 
men and diplomatists ; and the long period of suspense which their 
policy had won was ending in the clash of national and political 
passions. The rising fanaticism of the Catholic world, driven to 
frenzy by the martyrdom of the English Jesuits, broke down the 
caution and hesitation of Philip ; while England set aside the balanced 
neutrality of Elizabeth, and pushed boldly forward to a contest 
which it felt to be inevitable. The public opinion, to which the Queen 
was so sensitive, took every day a bolder and more decided tone. 
When one of the last of her matrimonial intrigues threatened England 
with a Catholic sovereign in the Duke of Alengon, a younger son of 
the hated Catherine of Medicis, the popular indignation rose suddenly 
into a cry against '' a Popish King '' which the Queen dared not defy. 
Her cold indifference to the heroic struggle in Flanders was more 
than compensated by the enthusiasm it excited among the nation at 
large. The earlier Flemish refugees found a refuge in the Cinque 
Ports. The exiled merchants of Antwerp were welcomed by the 
merchants of London. While EKzabeth dribbled out her secret aid 
to the Prince of Orange, the London traders sent him half-a-million 
from their own purses, a sum equal to a year's revenue of the Crown. 
Volunteers stole across the Channel in increasing numbers to the aid 



4o6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of the Dutch, till the five hundred Englishmen who fought in the 
beginning of the struggle rose to a brigade of five thousand, whose 
bravery turned one of the most critical battles of the war. Dutch 
privateers found shelter in English ports, and English vessels hoisted 
the flag of the States for a dash at the Spanish traders. The Pro- 
testant fervour rose steadily as "the best captains and soldiers" 
returned from the campaigns in the Low Countries to tell of Alva's 
atrocities, or as privateers brought back tales of English seamen who 
had been seized in Spain and the New World, to linger amidst the 
tortures of the Inquisition, or to die in its fires. In the presence of 
this steady drift of popular passion the diplomacy of Elizabeth became 
of little moment. V If the Queen was resolute for peace, England was 
resolute for waf. ^ A new daring had arisen since the beginning of 
her reign, when Cecil and the Queen stood alone in their belief in 
England's strength, and when the diplomatists of Europe regarded 
her obstinate defiance of Spain as " madness." The whole people 
had soon caught the self-confidence and daring of their Queen.;>^ Four 
years after her accession the seamen of the Southern coast were 
lending their aid to the Huguenots ; and the Channel swarmed with 
" sea-dogs," as they were called, who accepted letters of marque from 
the Prince of Conde and the French Protestants, and took heed 
neither of the complaints of the French Court nor of Elizabeth's 
own efforts at repression. Her efforts failed before the connivance 
of every man along the coast, of the port-officers of the Crown itself, 
who made profit out of the spoil, and of the gentry of the West, who 
were hand and glove with the adventurers. The temporary suspension 
of the French contest only drove the sea-dogs to the West Indies ; for 
the Papal decree which gave the New World to Spain, and the threats 
of Philip against any Protestant who should visit its seas, fell idly on 
the ears of English seamen. It was in vain that their trading vessels 
were seized and the sailors flung into the dungeons of the Inquisition, 
"laden with irons, without sight of sun or moon." The profits of 
the trade were large enough to counteract its perils, and the bigotry 
of Philip was met by a bigotry as merciless as his own. Francis 
Drake-, whose name became the terror of the Spanish Indies, was 
the son of a Protestant vicar in Kent, whose family had suffered for 
their religion in the time of the Six Articles ; and his Puritanism 
went hand in hand with his love of adventure. To sell negroes to 
the planters, to kill Spaniards, to sack gold-ships was in the young 
seaman's mind the work of " the elect of God." He had conceived 
a daring design of penetrating into the Pacific, whose waters had 
never seen an English flag ; and, backed by a company of adventurers, 
he set sail for the Southern seas in a vessel hardly as big as a Channel 
schooner, with a few yet smaller companions who fell away before the 
storms and perils of the voyage. But Drake with his one ship and 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



407 



eighty men held boldly on ; and passing the Straits of Magellan, 
untraversed as yet by any Englishman, swept the unguarded coast 
of Chili and Peru, loaded his bark with the gold-dust and silver- 
ingots of Potosi. and with the pearls, emeralds, and diamonds which 
formed the cargo of the great galleon that sailed once a year from 
Lima to Cadiz. With spoils of above half-a-million in value the 
daring adventurer steered undauntedly for the Moluccas, rounded the 
Cape of Good Hope, and after completing the circuit of the globe 
dropped anchor again in Plymouth harbour. 

The romantic daring of Drake's voyage, and the vastness of the 
spoil, roused a general enthusiasm throughout England ; but the 
welcome he received from Elizabeth on his return was accepted by 
Philip as an outrage which could only be expiated by war. The 
personal wrong was embittered in the year which followed by the 
persecution of the Jesuits, and by the outcry of the Catholic world 
against the King's selfish reluctance to avenge the blood of its martyrs. 
Sluggish as it was, his blood was fired at last by the defiance with 
which Elizabeth received all prayers for redress. She met his de- 
mand for Drake's surrender by knighting the freebooter, and by 
wearing in her crown the jewels he had offered her as a present. 
When the Spanish ambassador threatened that "matters would come 
to the cannon," she replied " quietly, in her most natural voice, as 
if she were telling a common story," wrote Mendoza, "that if I used 
threats of that kind she would fling me into a dungeon." It was in 
the same spirit that she rejected Philip's intercession on behalf of the 
Catholics, and for the relaxation of the oppressive laws against their 
worship. Outraged as he was, she believed that with Flanders still 
in revolt, and France longing for her alliance to enable it to seize the 
Low Countries, the King could not afford to quarrel with her ; and her 
trust in his inactivity seemed justified by the jealousy with which he 
regarded, and succeeded in foiling, the project for a Catholic revolt 
which was to have followed a descent of the Guises on the English 
coast. But if Philip shielded Elizabeth from France, it was because 
he reserved England for his own ambition. The first vessels of the 
great fleet of invasion which was to take the name of the Armada 
were gathering slowly in the Tagus, when two remarkable events freed 
the King's. hands for action by changing the face of European politics. 
The assassination of the Prince of Orange seemed to leave Flanders 
at his mercy, and the death of the Duke of Alengon left Henry of 
Navarre, the leader of the Huguenot party, heir of the crown of 
France. To prevent the triumph of heresy in the succession of a 
Protestant king, the Guises and the French Catholics rose at once 
in arms ; but the Holy League which they form.ed rested mainly on 
the support of Philip. Philip therefore, so long as he supplied them 
with men and money, was secure on the side of France. At the same 



4o8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



time the progress of his army under the Prince of Parma, and the 
divisions of the States after the loss of their great leader, promised 
a speedy reconquest of the Low Countries ; and the fall of Antwerp 
after a gallant resistance convinced even Elizabeth of the need for 
action if the one " bridle to Spain which kept war out of our own 
gates " was to be saved. Lord Leicester was hurried to the Flemish 
coast with 8,000 men ; but their forced inaction was chequered only 
by a disastrous skirmish at Zutphen, the fight in which Sidney fell, 
while Elizabeth was vainly striving to negotiate a peace between Philip 
and the States. Meanwhile dangers thickened round her in England 
itself. Maddened by persecution, by the hopelessness of rebellion 
within or of deliverance from without, the fiercer Catholics listened 
to schemes of assassination, to which the murder of William of Orange 
lent at the moment a terrible significance. The detection of Somer- 
ville, a fanatic who had received the Host before setting out for London 
" to shoot the Queen with his dagg," was followed by measures of 
natural severity, by the flight and arrest of Catholic gentry and peers, 
by a vigorous purification of the Inns of Court, where a few Catholics 
lingered, and by the despatch of fresh batches of priests to the block. 
The trial and death of Parry, a member of the House of Commons who 
had served in the Queen's household, on a similar charge, brought the 
Parliament together in a transport of horror and loyalty. All Jesuits 
and semmary priests were banished from the realm on pain of death. 
A bill for the security of the Queen disqualified any claimant of the 
succession, who instigated subjects to rebeUion or hurt to the Queen's 
person, from ever succeeding to the Crown. The threat was aimed at 
Mary Stuart. Weary of her long restraint, of her failure to rouse 
Philip or Scotland to aid her, of the baffled revolt of the English 
Catholics and the baffled intrigues of the Jesuits, she bent for a moment 
to submission. " Let me go," she wrote to Elizabeth ; " let me retire 
from this island to some solitude where I may prepare my soul to die. 
Grant this and I will sign away every right which either I or mine can 
claim." But the cry was useless, and her despair found a new and 
more terrible hope in the plots against Elizabeth's life. She knew 
I and approved the vow of Anthony Babington and a band of young 
' Catholics, for the most part connected with the Royal household, to kill 
the Queen ; but plot and approval alike passed through Walsingham's 
hands, and the seizure of Mary's correspondence revealed her guilt. 
In spite of her protests, a Commission of Peers sate as her judges at 
Fotheringay Castle ; and their verdict of " guilty " annihilated under 
the provisions of the recent statute , her claim to the Crown. The 
streets of London blazed with bonfires, and peals rang out from 
steeple to steeple at the news of her condemnation ; but, in spite of 
I the prayer of Parliament for her execution, and the pressure of th<r 
j Council, Elizabeth shrank from her death. The force of pubLc 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



409 



opinion, however, was now carrying all before it, and the unanimous 
demand of her people wrested at last a sullen consent from the 
Queen. She flung the warrant signed upon the floor, and the Council 
took on themselves the responsibihty of executing it. Mary died on 
a scaffold which was erected in the castle-hall at Fotheringay, as 
dauntlessly as she had lived. "Do not weep," she said to her ladies, 
" I have given my word for you." '' Tell my friends/' she charged 
Melville, " that I die a good Catholic." 

The blow was hardly struck before Elizabeth turned with fury on 
the ministers who had forced her hand. Burghley was for a while 
disgraced. Davison, who carried the warrant to the Council, w^as 
flung into the Tower to atone for an act which shattered the policy 
of the Queen. The death of Mary Stuart in fact removed the last 
obstacle out of Philip's way, by putting an end to the divisions of the 
English Catholics. To him, as to the nearest heir in blood who was 
oi the Catholic Faith, Mary bequeathed her rights to the Crown, and 
the hopes of her adherents were from that moment bound up in the 
success of Spain. The presence of an English army in Flanders 
only convinced Philip that the road to the conquest of the States lay 
through England itself; and the operations of Parma in the Low 
Countries were suspended wath a view to the greater enterprise. 
\^essels and supplies for the fleet which had for three years been 
gathering in the Tagus were collected from every port of the Spanish 
coast. It was time for Elizabeth to strike, and the news of the coming 
Armada called Drake again to sea. He had sailed a year before for 
the Indies at the head of twenty-five vessels ; had requited the wrongs 
inflicted by the Inquisition on English seamen by plundering Vigo 
on his w^ay ; and avenged his disappointment at the escape of the 
gold fleet by the sack of- Santiago, and by ravaging San Domingo and 
Carthagena. He now set sail again with thirty small barks, burnt 
the storeships and galleys in the harbour of Cadiz, stormed the ports 
of the Faro, and was only foiled in his aim of attacking the Armada 
itself by orders from home. A desce-nt up^pn Corunna however com- 
pleted what Drake called his " singeing of the Spanish King's beard." 
Elizabeth used the daring blow to back her negotiations for peace ; 
but the Spanish pride had been touched to the quick. Amidst the 
exchange of protocols Parma gathered thirty thousand men for the 
coming invasion, collected a fleet of flat-bottomed transports at Dun- 
kirk, and waited impatiently for the Armada to protect his crossing. 
But the attack of Drake, the death of its first admiral, and the winter 
storms delayed the fleet from sailing till the spring ; and it had 
hardly started when a gale in- the Bay of Biscay drove its scattered 
vessels into Ferrol. It was only on the last day of July that the sails 
of the Armada were seen from the Lizard, and the English beacons 
flared out their alarm along the coast. The news found England 



\ 






I '- 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



ready. An army was mustering under Leicester at Tilbury, the 
militia of the midland counties were gathering to London, while those 
of the south and east were held in readiness to meet a descent on 
either shore. Had Parma landed on the earliest day he purposed, he 
would have found his w^ay to London barred by a force stronger than 
his own, a force too of men who had already crossed pikes on equal 
terms with his best infantry in Flanders. " When I shall have 
landed," he warned his master, "I must fight battle after battle, I 
shall lose men by wounds and disease, I must leave detachments 
behind me to keep open my communications ; and in a short time the 
body of my army wull become so weak that not only I may be unable 
to advance in the face of the enemy, and time may be given to the 
heretics and your Majesty's other enemies to interfere, but there may 
fall out some notable inconveniences, with the loss of everything, and 
1 be unable to remedy it.'' Even had the Prince landed, in fact, the 
only real chance of Spanish success lay in a Catholic rising ; and at 
this crisis patriotism proved stronger than religious fanaticism in the 
hearts of the English Catholics. Catholic gentry brought their 
vessels up alongside of Drake and Lord Howard, and Catholic lords 
led their tenantry to the niuster at Tilbury. But to secure a land- 
ing at all, the Spaniards had to be masters of the Channel ; and in 
the Channel lay an English fleet resolved to struggle hard for the 
mastery. As the Armada sailed on in a broad crescent past Ply-| 
mouih, moving towards its point of junction wath Parma at Dunkirk,- 
the vessels w^hich had gathered under Lord Howard of Effingham 
slipped out of the bay and hung with the wind upon their rear. In 
numbers the two forces were strangely unequal ; the English fleet 
counted only 80 vessels against the 130 which composed the Armada. 
In size of ships the disproportion was even greater. Fifty of the 
English vessels, including the squadron of Lord Howard and the craft 
of the volunteers, were little bigger than yachts of the present day. 
Even of the thirty Queen's ships which formed its main body, there 
were only four which equalled in tonnage the smallest of the Spanish 
galleons. Sixty-five of these galleons formed the most formidable half 
of the Spanish fleet ; and four galleasses, or gigantic galleys, armed 
with 50 guns apiece, fifty-six armed merchantmen, and twenty pinnaces, 
made up the rest. The Armada was provided with 2,500 cannons, and 
a vast store of provisions ; it had on board 8,000 seamen and 20,000 
soldiers ; and if a court-favourite, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, had 
been placed at its head, he was supported by the ablest staff of naval 
officers which Spain possessed. Small, however, as the English 
ships were, they were in perfect trim ; they sailed two feet for the 
Spaniards' one, they were manned with 9,000 hardy seamen, and their 
Admiral was backed by a crowd of captains who had won fame in the 
Spanish seas. With him was Hawkins, who had been the first to 



VIL] 



7 HE REFORM A TION, 



411 



break into the charmed circle of the Indies ; Frobisher, the hero of 
the North-West passage ; and above all Drake, who held command of 
the privateers. They had won too the advantage of the wind ; and, 
closing in or drawing off as they would, the lightTy-handled English 
vessels, which fired four shots to the Spaniard's one, hung boldly on 
the rear of the great fleet as it moved along the Channel, " The 
feathers of the Spaniard,^^ in the phrase of the English seamen, were 
'^plucked one by one." Galleon after galleon was sunk, boarded, 
driven on shore ; and yet M edina Sidonia failed in bringing his pur- 
suers to a close engagement* Now halting, now moving slowly on 
the running fight between the two fleets lasted throughout the week, 
till the Armada dropped anchor in Calais roads. The time had now 
come for sharper work if the junction of the Armada with Parma was 
to be prevented ; for, demoralized as the Spaniards had been by the 
merciless chase, their loss in ships had not been great, while the 
English supplies of food and ammunition were fast running out. 
Howard resolved to force an engagement ; and, lighting eight fire-ships 
at midnight, sent them down with the tide upon the Spanish line. The 
galleons at once cut their cables, and stood out in panic to sea, 
drifting with the wind in a long line off Gravelines. Drake resolved 
at all costs to prevent their return. At dawn the English ships 
closed fairly in, and almost their last cartridge was spent ere the 
sun went down. Three great galleons had sunk, three had drifted 
helplessly on to the Flemish coast ; but the bulk of the Spanish vessels 
remained, and even to Drake the fleet seemed 'Svonderful great and 
strong." Within the Armada itself however all hope was gone. 
Huddled together by the wind and the deadly English fire, their sails 
torn, their masts shot away, the crowded galleons had become mere 
slaughter-houses. Four thousand men had fallen, and bravely as the 
seamen fought they were cowed by the terrible butchery. Medina 
himself was in despair. " We are lost, Seflor Oquenda," he cried to 
his bravest captain ; " what are we to do 1 " " Let others talk of being 
lost," replied Oquenda, "your Excellency has only to order up fresh 
cartridge." But Oquenda stood alone, and a council of war resolved 
on retreat to Spain by the one course open, that of a circuit round the 
Orkneys. *^ Never anything pleased me better," wrote Drake, " than 
seeing the enemy fly with a southerly wind to the northwards. Have 
a good eye to the Prince of Parma, for, with the grace of God, if we 
like, I doubt not ere it be long so to handle the matter with the Duke 
of Sidonia, as he shall wish himself at St. Mary Port among his orange 
trees." But the work of destruction was reserv^ed for a mightier foe 
than Drake. Supplies fell short and the English vessels were forced 
to give up the chase ; but the Spanish ships which remained had no 
s sooner reached the Orkneys than the storms of the northern seas 
broke on them with a fury before which all concert and union disap- 



412 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



peared. Fifty reached Corunna, bearing ten thousand men stricken 
with pestilence and death ; of the rest some were sunk, some dashed 
to pieces against the Irish chffs. The wreckers of the Orkneys and 
the Faroes, the clansmen of the Scottish Isles, the kernes of Donegal 
and Galway, all had their part in the work of murder and robbery. 
Eight thousand Spaniards perished between the Giant's Causeway 
and the Blaskets. On a strand near Sligo an English captain num- 
bered eleven hundred corpses which had been cast up by the sea. 
The flower of the Spanish nobility, who had been sent on the new 
crusade under Alonzo da Leyva, after twice suffering shipwreck, put 
a third time to sea to founder on a reef near Dumblane. 

Section VII.— The Ulizabethan Poets. 

{^Authorities. — For a general account of this period, see Mr. Morley's ad- 
mirable ** First Sketch of English Literature/* Hallam's ** Literary History," 
M. Taine's "History of English Literature," &c. Mr. Craik has elaborately 
illustrated the works of Spenser, and full details of the history of our early 
drama maybe found in Mr. Collier's *' History of English Dramatic Literature 
to the time of Shakspere." Malone's enquiry remains the completest inves- 
tigation into the history of Shakspere's dramas ; and the works of Mr. 
Armytage Brown and Mr. Gerald Massey contain the latest theories as to 
the Sonnets. For Ben Jonson and his fellows, see their works with the notes 
of Gifford, &c.] 

We have already watched the shy revival of English letters during 
the earlier half of Elizabeth^s reign. The general awakening of 
national life, the increase of wealth, of refinement and leisure, which 
marked that period, had been accompanied, as we have seen, by a 
quickening of English intelligence, which found vent in an upgrowth 
of grammar schools, in the new impulse given to classical learning at 
the Universities, in a passion for translations, which familiarized all 
England with the masterpieces of Italy and Greece, and above all in the 
crude but vigorous efforts of Sackville and Lyly after a nobler poetry 
and prose. But to these local and peculiar influences was to be added 
a more general influence, that of the restlessness and curiosity which 
characterized the age. , The sphere of human interest was widened 
as it has never been widened before or since by the revelation of a 
new heaven and a new earth. It was only in the later years of the 
sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought 
home to the general intelligence of the world by Kepler and Galileo, 
or that the daring of the Buccaneers broke through the veil which the 
greed of Spain had drawn across the New World of Columbus. 
Hardly inferior to these revelations as a source of poetic impulse was 
the sudden and picturesque way in which the various races of the 
world were brought face to face with one another through the 
universal passion for foreign travel. While the red tribes of the 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



413 



West were described by Amerigo Vespucci, and the strange civilization 
of Mexico and Peru disclosed by Cortez and Pizarro, the voyages of 
the Portuguese threw open the older splendours of the East, and the 
story of India and China was told for the first time to Christendom 
by Maffei and Mendoza. England took her full part in this work 
of discovery. Jenkinson, an Enghsh traveller, made his way to 
Bokhara. Willoughby brought back Muscovy to the knowledge of 
Western Europe. English mariners penetrated among the Esquimaux, 
or settled in Virginia. Drake circumnavigated the globe. The 
" Collection of Voyages/' which was published by Hakluyt, not only 
disclosed the vastness of the world itself, but the infinite number of 
the races of mankind, the variety of their laws, their customs, their 
religions, their very instincts. We see the influence of this new and 
wider knowledge of the world, not only in the life and richness which 
it gave to the imagination of the time, but in the immense interest 
which from this moment attached itself to Man. Shakspere's conception 
of Caliban, as well as the questionings of Montaigne, mark the beginning 
of a new and a truer, because a more inductive, philosophy of human 
nature and human history. The fascination exercised by the study of 
human character showed itself in the essays of Bacon, and yet more in 
the wonderful popularity of the drama. And to these larger and world- 
wide sources of poetic powers was added in England, at the moment 
which we have reached in its stor\', the impulse which sprang from 
national triumph. The victory over the Armada, the deliverance from 
Spain, the rolling away of the Catholic terror which had hung like a 
cloud over the hopes of the new people, was like a passing from death 
into life. The whole aspect of England suddenly changed. As yet 
the interest of Elizabeth's reign had been political and material ; the 
stage had been crowded with statesmen and warriors, with Cecils 
and Walsinghams and Drakes. Literature had hardly found a place 
in the glories of the time. But from the moment when the Armada 
drifted back broken to Ferrol the figures of warriors and statesmen 
were dwarfed by the grander figures of poets and philosophers. Amidst 
the throng in Elizabeth's antechamber the noblest form is that of the 
singer who lays the " Faerie Queen '' at her feet, or of the young lawyer 
who muses amid the splendours of the presence over the problems of 
the "Novum Organon.'' The triumph at Cadiz, the conquest of 
Ireland, pass unheeded as we watch Hooker building up his " Eccle- 
siastical Polity" among the sheepfolds, or the genius of Shakspere 
rising year by year into supremer grandeur in a rude theatre beside 
the Thames. 

The full glor}^ of the new literature broke on England with Edmund 
Spenser. We know little of his life ; he was bom in East London 
of poor parents, but connected with the Spencers of Althorpe, even 
then — as he proudly says — ** a house of ancient fame." He studied 



The Eliza- 
bethan 
Poets. 



4X4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



as a sizar at Cambridge, and quitted the University while still a boy 
to live as a tutor in the north ; but after some years of obscure poverty 
the scorn of a fair " Rosalind " drove him again southwards. A 
college friendship with Gabriel Harvey served to introduce him to 
Lord Leicester, who sent him as his envoy into France, and in whose 
service he first became acquainted with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip 
Sidney. From Sidne/s house at Penshurst came his earliest work, 
the '' Shepherd's Calendar ; " in form, Hke Sidney's own " Arcadia," a 
pastoral, where love and loyalty and Puritanism jostled oddly with the 
fancied shepherd life. The peculiar melody and profuse imagination 
which the pastoral disclosed at once placed its author in the forefront 
of living poets, but a far greater work was already in hand ; and from 
some v/ords of Gabriel Harvey's we see Spenser bent on rivalling 
Ariosto, and even hoping " to overgo " the " Orlando Furioso," in his 
" Elvish Queen." The ill-will or indifference of Burleigh, however, 
blasted the expectations he had drawn from the patronage of Sidney or 
the Earl of Leicester, and the favour with which he had been welcomed 
by the Queen. Sidney, himself in disgrace with EHzabeth, withdrew 
to Wilton to write the " Arcadia," by his sister's side ; and " discontent 
of my long fruitless stay in princes' courts," the poet tells us, " and 
expectation vain of idle hopes," drove Spenser at last into exile. He 
followed Lord Grey as his secretary into Ireland, and remained there 
on the Deputy's recall in the enjoyment of an office and a grant of 
land from the forfeited estates of the Earl of Desmond. Spenser 
had thus enrolled himself among the colonists to whom England was 
looking at the time for the regeneration of Southern Ireland, and the 
practical interest he took in the " barren soil where cold and want and 
poverty do grow " was shown by the later publication of a prose trac- 
tate on the condition and government of the island. It was at Dublin 
or in his castle of Kilcolman, two miles from Doneraile, "under the 
fall of Mole, that mountain hoar," that he spent the memorable years 
in which Maiy fell on the scaffold and the Armada came and went ; 
and it was in the latter home that Walter Raleigh found him sitting 
"alwaies idle," as it seemed to his restless friend, "among the cooly 
shades of the green alders by the Mulla's shore," in a visit made memor- 
able by the poem of " Colin Clout's come Home again." But in the 
" idlesse" and solitude of the poet's exile the great work begun in the 
two pleasant years of his stay at Penshurst had at last taken form, 
and it was to publish the first three books of the " Faerie Queen " 
that Spenser returned in Raleigh's company to London. 

The appearance of the " Faerie Queen " is the one critical event in the 
annals of English poetry ; it settled, in fact, the question whether there 
was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national 
verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly 
into a grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



415 



complete death. Across the Border, indeed, the Scotch poets of the 
fifteenth century preserved something of their master's vivacity and 
colour, and in England itself the Italian poetry of the Renascence had 
of late found echoes in Surrey and Sidney. The new English drama 
too, as we shall presently see, was beginning to display its wonderful 
powers, and the work of Marlowe had already prepared the way for 
the work of Shakspere. But bright as was the promise of coming 
song, no great imaginative poem had broken the silence of English 
literature for nearly two hundred years when Spenser landed at Bristol 
with the " Faerie Queen.'' From that moment the stream of English 
poetry has flowed on without a break. There have been times, as in 
the years which immediately followed, when England has " become 
a nest of singing birds ; " there have been times when song was scant 
and poor ; but there never has been a time when England was wholly 
without a singer. The new English verse has been true to the source 
from which it sprang, and Spenser has always been " the poet's poet." 
But in his own day he was the poet of England at large. The "Faerie 
Queen" was received with a burst of general welcome. It became 
" the delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every 
poet, the solace of every soldier." The poem expressed, indeed, the 
very life of the time. It was with a true poetic instinct that Spenser 
fell back for the framework of his story on the faery world of Celtic 
romance, whose wonder and mystery had in fact become the truest 
picture of the wonder and mystery of the world around him. In the 
age of Cortez and of Raleigh dreamland had ceased to be dreamland, 
and no marvel or adventure that befell lady or knight was stranger 
than the tales which weather-beaten mariners from the Southern Seas 
were telling every day to grave merchants upon 'Change. The very in- 
congruities of the story of Arthur and his knighthood, strangely as it had 
been built up out of the rival efforts of bard and jongleur and priest, 
made it the fittest vehicle for the expression of the world of incongruous 
feeling which we call the Renascence. To modern eyes perhaps there 
is something grotesque in the strange medley of figures which crowd 
the canvas of the ^' Faerie Queen," in its fauns dancing on the sward 
where knights have hurtled together, in its alternation of the salvage- 
men from the New World with the satyrs of classic mythology, in the 
giants, dwarfs, and monsters of popular fancy, who jostle with the 
nymphs of Greek legend and the damosels of mediaeval romance. 
But, strange as the medley is, it reflects truly enough the stranger 
medley of warring ideals and irreconcileable impulses which made up 
the life of Spenser's contemporaries. It was not in the " Faerie Queen" 
only, but in the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism 
of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of 
the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell 
on imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible 



The Eliza- 
bethan. 
Poets. 



4i6 



HISTORY or THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which 
expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed with 
the rough practical energy that sprang from an awakening sense of 
human power, or the lawless extravagance of an idealized friendship 
and love with the moral sternness and elevation which England was 
drawing from the Reformation and the Bible. But strangely contrasted 
as are the elements of the poem, they are harmonized by the calmness 
and serenity which is the note of the " Faerie Queen." The world of 
the Renascence is around us, but it is ordered, refihed, and calmed by 
the poet's touch. The warmest scenes which he borrows from the 
Italian verse of his day are idealized into purity ; the very struggle 
of the men around him is lifted out of its pettier accidents, and raised 
into a spiritual oneness with the struggle in the soul itself. There are 
allusions in plenty to contemporary events, but the contest between 
Elizabeth and Mary takes ideal form in that of Una and the false 
Duessa, and the clash of arms between Spain and the Huguenots 
comes to us faint and hushed through the serener air. The verse, like 
the story, rolls on as by its own natural power, without haste or effort 
or delay. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often complex 
imagery which Spenser's imagination lavishes, leave no sense of con- 
fusion in the reader's mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is seen 
clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness, this 
serenity, this spiritual elevation of the " Faerie Queen," that we feel \k\^ 
new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious 
form the life of the Renascence. Both in its conception, and in the way 
in which this conception is realized in the portion of his work which 
Spenser completed, his poem strikes the note of the coming Puritanism. 
In his earlier pastoral, the " Shepherd's Calendar," the po-et had boldly 
taken his part with the more advanced reformers against the Church 
pohcy of the Court. He had chosen Archbishop Grindal, who was 
then in disgrace for his Puritan sympathies, as his model of a Chris- 
tian pastor ; and attacked with sharp invective the pomp of the higher 
clergy. His " Faerie Queen," in its religious theory, is Puritan to 
the core. The worst foe of its " Red-cross Knight " is the false and 
scarlet-clad Duessa of Rome, who parts him for a while from Truth 
and leads him to the house of Ignorance. Spenser presses strongly 
! and pitilessly for the execution of Mary Stuart. No bitter word ever 
breaks the calm of his verse save when it touches on the perils with 
which Catholicism was environing England, perils before which his 
knight must fall " were not that Heavenly Grace doth him uphold 
and steadfast Truth acquite him out of all." But it is yet more in 
the temper and aim of his work that we catch the nobler and 
deeper tones of English Puritanism. In his earlier musings at Pens- 
hurst the poet had purposed to surpass Ariosto, but the gaiety of 
Ariosto's song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION', 



417 



breaks the calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, ! Sec. VIL 
and the seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his the"eliza« 
poetic purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral 
virtues, to assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence 
flight be expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds 
of arms and chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he pur- 
posed to paint, he wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous 
man in its struggle with the faults and errors which specially beset it ; • 
till in Arthur, the sum of the whole company, man might have been 
seen perfected, in his longing and progress towards the " Faerie 
Queen," the Divine Glory which is the true end of human effort. The 
largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and above 
all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from the 
narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into 
unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his Chris- 
tianity is enriched and fertiHzed by the larger temper of the Rena- 
scence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which the 
older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of heathen- 
dom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new faith ; 
and in one of the greatest songs of the " Faerie Queen," the concep- 
tion of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into the 
mighty thought of the productive enei'gy of Nature. Spenser borrows 
in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to 
express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others 
have loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he 
is fired as none before or after him have been fired with a passionate 
sense of moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere 
names to him, but real existences to which his whole nature clings 
with a rapturous affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and 
loved because it sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There 
was much in such a moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, 
but it is the glory of the age of Elizabeth that, " mad world '' as in 
many ways it was, all that was noble welcomed the " Faerie Queen." 
Ehzabeth herself, says Spenser, " to mine open pipe inclined her ear," 
and bestowed a pension on the poet. He soon returned to Ireland, to 
commemorate his marriage in Sonnets and the most beautiful of bridal 
songs, and to complete three more books of his poem amongst love 
and poverty and troubles from his Irish neighbours. Trouble was, 
indeed, soon to take a graver form. Spenser was still at work on the 
*^ Faerie Queen " when the Irish discontent broke into revolt, and the 
poet escaped from his burning house to fly to England, and to die 
broken-hearted, it may be — as Jonson says — " for want of bread," in 
an inn at Westminster. 

If the " Faerie Queen " expressed the higher elements of the Eliza- 
bethan age, the whole of that age, its lower elements and its higher 

E E 



4i8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VII. 



alike, was expressed in the English drama. We have already pointed 
out the circumstances which everywhere throughout Europe were 
giving a poetic impulse to the newly-aroused intelligence of men, 
and it is remarkable that this impulse everywhere took a dramatic 
shape. The artificial French tragedy which began about this time 
with Garnier, was not, indeed, destined to exert any influence over 
English poetry till a later age ; but the influence of the Italian comedy, 
which had begun half a century earlier with Machiavelli and Ariosto, 
was felt directly through the Novelle, or stories, which served as 
plots for the dramatists. It left its stamp indeed, on some of the worst |] 
characteristics of the EngHsh stage. The features of our drama thatf | 
startled the moral temper of the time and won the deadly hatred of the 
Puritan, its grossness and profanity, its tendency to scenes of horror 
and crime, its profuse employment of cruelty and lust as grounds of 
dramatic action, its daring use of the horrible and the unnatural 
whenever they enable it to display the more terrible and revolting 
sides of himian passion, were derived from the Italian stage. It is 
doubtful how much the English playwrights may have owed to the 
Spanish drama, that under Lope and Cervantes sprang suddenly into 
a grandeur which almost rivalled their own. In the intermixture of 
tragedy and comedy, in the abandonment of the solemn uniformity 
of poetic diction for the colloquial language of real life, the use of 
unexpected incidents, the complications of their plots and intrigjjidl, 
the dramas of England and Spain are remarkably alike ; but the 
likeness seems rather to have sprung from a similarity in the circum- 
stances to which both owed their rise, than to any direct connexion 
of the one with the other. The real origin of the English drama, 
in fact, lay not in any influence from without, but in the influence of 
England itself. The temper of the nation was dramatic. Ever since 
the Reformation, the Palace, the Inns of Court, and the University 
had been vyeing with one another in the production of plays ; and 
so early was their popularity, that even under Henry the Eighth it was 
foimd necessary to create a " Master of the Revels " to supervise them. 
Every progress of Elizabeth from shire to shire was a succession 
of shows and interludes. Dian with her nymphs met the Queen 
as she returned from hunting; Love presented her with his golden 
arrow as she passed through the gates of Norwich. From the 
earlier years of her reign, the new spirit of the Renascence had 
been pouring itself into the rough mould of the Mystery Plays, 
whose allegorical virtues and vices, or scriptural heroes and heroines, 
had handed on the spirit of the drama through the Middle Ages. 
Adaptations from classical pieces soon began to alternate with the 
purely religious " Morahties ; '' and an attempt at a livelier style of 
expression and invention appeared in the popular comedy of " Gammer 
JGurton's Needle;" while Sackville, Lord Dorset, in his tragedy of 



VIL] 



THE RE FORMA TION, 



4i 



^* Gorboduc " made a bold effort at sublimity of diction, and intro- } 
duced the use of blank verse as the vehicle of dramatic dialogue. ! 
But it was not to these tentative efforts of scholars and nobles that I 
the English stage was really indebted for the amazing outburst of genius, 
which dates from the moment when " the Earl of Leicester's servants " 
erected the first public theatre in Blackfriars. It was the people itself 
that created its Stage. The theatre, indeed, was commonly only the 
courtyard of an inn, or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country 
fair ; the bulk of the audience sate beneath the open sky in the " pit " 
or yard, a few covered seats in the galleries which ran round it formed 
the boxes of the wealthier spectators, while patrons and nobles found 
seats upon the actual boards. All the appliances were of the roughest 
sort : a few flowers served to indicate a garden, crov/ds and armies 
were represented by a dozen scene-shifters with swords and bucklers, 
heroes rode in and out on hobby-horses, and a scroll on a post told 
whether the scene was at Athens or London. There were no female 
actors, and the grossness which startles us in words which fell from 
women's lips took a different colour when every woman's part was 
acted by a boy. But difficulties such as these were more than com- 
pensated by the popular character of the drama itself. Rude as the 
theatre might be, all the world was there. The stage was crowded 
with nobles and courtiers. Apprentices and citizens thronged the 
benches in the yard below. The rough m.ob of the pit inspired, as 
it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy, 
the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the 
chat, the wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the 
coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all 
classes of society, the intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest 
developments of human temper, which characterized the English stage. 
The new drama represented " the very age and body of the time, his 
form and feature." The people itself brought its nobleness and its 
vileness to the boards. No stage was ever so human, no poetic life 
so intense. Wild, reckless, defiant of all past tradition, of all con- 
ventional lav.'S, the English dramatists owned no teacher, no source 
of poetic inspiration, but the people itself. 

Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden 
rise of the Elizabethan drama. The first public theatre, as we have 
seen, was erected only in the middle of the Queen's reign. Before the 
close of it eighteen theatres existed in London alone. Fifty dramatic 
poets, many of the first order, appeared in the fifty years which pre- 
cede the closing of the theatres by the Puritans; and great as is the 
number of their works which have perished, we still possess a hundred 
dramas, all written within this period, and of which at least a half are 
excellent. A glance at their authors shows us that the intellectual 
quickening of the age had now reached the mass of the people. 

E E 2 



Sej. Vi 
The E.: 

BETH.-. 

Poet r 



420 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Almost all of the new playwrights were fairly educated, and many werell 
University men. But, instead of courtly singers of the Sidney and 
Spenser sort, we see the advent of the "poor scholar. ' The earlier 
dramatists, such as Nash, Peele, Kyd, Greene, or Marlowe, were for the 
most part poor, and reckless in their poverty ; wild livers, defiant of 
law or common fame, in revolt against the usages and religion of their 
day, "atheists" in general repute, "holding Moses for a juggler," 
haunting the brothel and the alehouse, and dying starved or in tavern 
brawls. But with their appearance began the Elizabethan drama. 
The few plays which have reached us of an earlier date are either 
cold imitations of the classical and Italian comedy, or rude farces 
Hke " Ralph Roister Bolster,'^ or tragedies such as " Gorboduc," where, 
poetic as occasional passages may be, there is little promise of 
dramatic development. But in the year which preceded the coming 
of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage suddenly changes, and 
the new dramatists range themselves around two men of very 
different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. Of Greene, 
as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already spoken. 
But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance. No figure better 
paints the group of young playwrights. He Wt Cambridge to travel 
through Italy and Spain, and to bring back the debauchery of the one 
and the scepticism of the other. In the words of remorse he wrote 
before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and a roysterer, 
winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to waste it on 
wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs. Hell and 
the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he liad 
not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God, 
he said, in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He 
married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted ; and the 
wretched profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he 
loathed, though he could not live without them. But wild as was the 
life of Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the 
love pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, 
and whose plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round 
him. His keen perception of character and the relations of social 
life, the playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style ex- 
erted an influence on his contemporaries hardly inferior to that of 
Marlowe. The hfe of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even 
more daring, than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early 
death alone saved him, in all probability, from a prosecution for 
atheism. He was charged with caUing Moses a juggler, and with 
boasting that, if he undertook to write a new religion, it should be a 
1 better religion than the Christianity he saw around him. But in a far 
higher degree than Greene he is the creator of the English drama. 
I Born at the opening of Elizabeth's reign, the son of a Canterbury 



1564- 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



421 



shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge, Marlowe burst on the world, 
in the year which preceded the triumph over the Armada, with a play 
which at once wrought a revolution in the English stage. Bombastic 
and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its height in the 
scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia," drew 
their conqueror's car across the stage, *' Tamburlaine " not only 
indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of 
Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret 
of which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed 
him. He perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief 
career he had struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His 
Jew of Malta was the herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward 
the Second'^ the series of historical plays which gave us "Caesar'^ 
and "Richard the Third." Riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad 
thirst for pleasure as it is, his " Faustus " was the first dramatic 
attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the un- 
seen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with 
superstition, the daring of human defiance in a heart abandoned to 
despair. Rash, unequal, stooping even to the ridiculous in his cum- 
brous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a force in Marlowe, a conscious 
grandeur of tone, a range of passion, which sets him above all his 
contemporaries save one. In the higher qualities of imagination, as 
in the majesty and sweetness of his " mighty line," he is inferior to 
Shakspere alone. 

A few daring jests, a brawl and a fatal stab, make up the life of 
Marlowe ; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of 
William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet, indeed, do we know 
so little. For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling 
legends, and these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or 
characteristic saying, not one of the jests " spoken at the Mermaid," 
hardly a single anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. 
His look and figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over 
his tomb at Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was 
still remembered in his native town ; but the minute diligence of the 
enquirers of the Georgian time w^as able to glean hardly a single 
detail, even of the most trivial order, which could throw light upon 
the years of retirement before his death. It is owing perhaps to the 
harmony and unity of his temper that no salient pecuHarity seems to 
have left its trace on the memory of his contemporaries; it is the 
very grandeur of his genius which precludes us from discovering any 
personal trait in his works. His supposed self-revelation in the 
Sonnets is so obscure that only a few outlines can be traced even by 
the boldest conjecture. In his dramas he is all his characters, and his 
characters range over all mankind. There is not one, or the act or 
word of one, that we can identify personally with the poet himself 



The Eliza- 
bethan 
Poets. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



He was bom in the sixth year of Elizabeth's reign, twelve years 
after the birth of Spenser, three years later than the birth of Bacon. 
Marlowe was of the same age with Shakspere : Greene probably a few 
years older. His father, a glover and small farmer of Stratford-on- 
Avon, was forced by poverty to lay down his office of alderman, as 
his son reached boyhood ; and the stress of poverty may have been 
the cause which drove William Shakspere, who was already married 
at eighteen to a wife older than himself, to London and the stage. || 
His life in the capital is said (but the statement is mere guesswork) fj 
to have begun in his twenty-third year, the memorable year which 
followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the Armada, and 
which witnessed the production of Marlowe's '* Tamburlaine." If we 
take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal feeling,, ■ 
his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the bitterness of 
self-contempt. He chides with Fortune, "that did not better for my: 
life provide than public means that public manners breed ;" he writhes 
at the thought that he has " made himself a motley to the view '^ ; 
of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. " Thence comes I 
it,'' he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence*' 
my nature is subdued to that it works in." But the application of 
the words is a more than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles 
with some of his dramatic rivals at the outset of his career, the 
genial nature of the newcomer seems to have won him a general love 
among his fellow-actors. In his early years, while still a mere fitter 
of old plays for the stage, a fellow-playwright, Chettle, answered 
Greene's attack on him in words of honest affection : " Myself have 
seen his demeanor no less civil, than he excellent in the quality he 
professes : besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of 
dealing, which augurs his honesty ; and his facetious grace in Vriting^ 
that approves his art." His partner Burbage spoke of him after 
death as a "worthy friend and fellow;" and Jonson handed down 
the general tradition of his time when he described him as " indeed 
honest, and of an open and free nature." 

His profession as an actor was at any rate of essential service to 
him in the poetic career which he soon undertook. Not only 
did it give him the sense of theatrical necessities which makes his 
plays so effective on the boards, but it enabled him to bring his pieces 
as he wrote them to the test of the stage. If there is any truth in 
Jonson's statement that Shakspere never blotted a line, there is no 
justice in the censure which it implies on his carelessness or incorrect- 
ness. The conditions of poetic publication were in fact wholly different 
from those of our own day. A drama remained for years in manuscript 
as an acting piece, subject to continual revision and amendment ; and 
every rehearsal and representation afforded hints for change, which we. 
know the young poet was far from neglecting. The chance which has 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION, 



423 



preserved an earlier edition of his "Hamlet" shows in what an unspar- 
ing way Shakspere could recast eren the finest products of his genius. 
Five years after the supposed date of his arrival in London, he was 
already famous as a dramatist. Greene speaks bitterly of him, under 
the name of " Shakescene," as an " upstart crow beautified with our 
feathers," a sneer which points to a time when the young author was pre- 
paring himself for loftier flights by fitting older pieces of his predecessors 
for the stage. He was soon partner in the theatre, actor, and play- 
wright ; and another nickname, that of " Johannes Factotum," or Jack- 
of-all-Trades, shows his readiness to take all honest work which came 
to hand. " Pericles" and "Titus Andronicus" are probably instances of 
almost worthless but popular plays touched up with a few additions 
fromx Shakspere's pen ; and of the Second and Third Parts of " Henry 
the Sixth " only about a third can be traced to him. The death scene 
of Cardinal Beaufort, though chosen by Reynolds in his famous 
picture as specially Shaksperian, is taken bodily from some older 
dramatist, Marlowe perhaps or Peele, whom Shakspere was adapting 
for the stage. 

With the poem of " Venus and Adonis," " the first heir of my inven- 
tion," as he calls it, the period of independent creation fairly began. 
The date of its publication was a very memorable one. The " Faerie 
Queen" had appeared only three years before, and had placed 
Spenser, without a rival, at the head of English poetry. On the 
other hand, the two leading dramatists of the time passed at this 
moment suddenly away. Greene died in poverty and self-reproach 
in the house of a poor shoemaker. " Doll," he wrote to the wife he 
had abandoned, " I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my 
souls rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ; for if he and his wife had 
not succoured me, I had died in the streets." " Oh, that a year were 
granted me to live," cried the young poet from his bed of death — " but I 
must die, of every man abhorred ! Time, loosely spent, will not again 
be won ! My time is loosely spent — and I undone ! " A year later, the 
death of Marlowe in a street brawl removed the only rival whose 
powers might have equalled Shakspere's own. He was now about 
thirty ; and the twenty-three years which elapsed between the appear- 
ance of the " Adonis " and his death were filled with a series of master- 
pieces. Nothing is more characteristic of his genius than its in- 
cessant activity. Throughout the whole of this period he produced 
on an average two dramas a year, and this in addition to the changes 
and transformations he effected in those already brought on the stage. 
When we attempt, however, to trace the growth and progress of the 
poet's mind in the order of his plays we are met, at least in the case of 
many of them, by an absence of any real information as to the dates of 
their appearance, which is hardly compensated by the guesses of later 
enquirers. The facts on which conjecture has to build are indeed 



Sec. VIL 

The Eliza- 
bethan 
Poets. 



1593-1595^ 



424 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



extremely few. "Venus and Adonis," with the "Lucrece,"must have been 
written before their publication in 1593-4; the Sonnets, though not - 
published till 1609, were known in some form among his private friends ' 
as early as 1598. His earlier play^ are defined by a list given in the 
" Wit's Treasury" of Francis Meres in 1598, though the omission of a 
play from a casual catalogue of this kind would hardly warrant us in as- 
suming its necessary non-existence at the time. The works ascribed to 
him at his death are fixed, in the same approximate fashion, through 
the edition published by his fellow-actors. Beyond these meagre facts, 
and our knowledge of the publication of a few of his dramas in his 
lifetime, all is uncertain ; and the conclusions which have been drawn 
from these, and from the dramas themselves, as well as from assumed 
resemblances with, or references to, other plays of the period can only 
be accepted as rough approximations to the truth. His lighter come- 
dies and historical dramas can be assigned with fair probability to 
the period between 1593, when he was known as nothing more than 
an adapter, and 1598, when they are mentioned in the list of Meres. 
They bear on them indeed the stamp of youth. In "Love's Labour's 
Lost," the young playwright quizzes the verbal wit and high-flown 
extravagance of thought and phrase which Euphues had made 
fashionable in the court world of the time ; his fun breaks almost riot- 
ously out in the practical jokes of the " Taming of the Shrew" and the 
endless blunderings of the " Comedy of Errors." His work is as yet ■ 
marked by little poetic elevation, or by passion ; but the easy grace of 
the dialogue, the dexterous management of a complicated story, the 
genial gaiety of his tone, and the music of his verse, placed Shakspere 
at once at the head of his fellows as a master of social comedy. In 
the " Two Gentlem-en of Verona," which followed, perhaps, these^arlier 
efforts, his painting of manners is suffused by a tenderness and ideal 
beauty, which formed an effective protest against the hard though vigor- 
ous character-painting which the first successof Ben Jonson in " Every- 
Man in his Humour " brought at the time into fashion. Quick on these 
lighter comedies followed two, in which his genius started fully into 
life. His poetic power, held in reserve till now, showed itself with a 
splendid profusion in the brilliant fancies of the " Midsummer Night's 
Dream ; " and passion swept like a tide of resistless delight through 
"Romeo and Juliet." Side by side however with these dehcate 
imaginings and piquant sketches of manners, had been appearing 
during this short interval of intense activity his historical dramas. 
No plays seem to have been more popular, from the earliest hours of 
the new stage, than dramatic representations of our history. Marlowe 
had shown in his " Edward the Second " what tragic grandeur could 
be reached in this favourite field ; and, as we have seen, Shakspere had 
been led naturally towards it by his earUer occupation as an adapter 
of stock pieces like " Henry the Sixth "for the new requirements of 



Vil.] 



THE RE FORMA TION. 



425 



the stage. He still to some extent followed in plan the older plays on 
the subjects he selected, but in his treatment of their themes he shook 
boldly off the yoke of the past. A larger and deeper conception of 
human character than any of the old dramatists had reached displayed 
itself in Richard the Third, in Falstaff, or in Hotspur; while in 
Constance and Richard the Second the pathos of human suffering 
was painted as even Marlowe had never dared to paint it. No 
dramas have done more for his enduring popularity with the mass of 
Englishmen than these historical plays of Shakspere ; echoing some- 
times, as they do, much of our national prejudice and unfairness of 
temper — (as in his miserable caricature of Joan of Arc) — but instinct 
throughout with English humour, with an Enghsh love of hard fight- 
ing, an English faith in the doom that waits upon triumphant evil, an 
English pity for the fallen. 

Whether as a tragedian or as a writer of social comedy, Shakspere 
had now passed far beyond his fellows. " The Muses," said Meres, 
" would speak with Shakspere's fine filed phrase, if they would speak 
English." His personal popularity was at its height. His pleasant 
temper, and the vivacity of his wit, had drawn him early into contact 
with the young Earl of Southampton, to whom his ^' Adonis " and 
*^ Lucrece " are dedicated ; and the different tone of the two dedications 
shows how rapidly acquaintance ripened into an ardent friendship. It is 
probably to Southampton that the earlier Sonnets were addressed during 
this period, while others may have been \vritten in the character of his 
friend during the quickly changing phases of the Earl's adventurous life. 
His wealth, too, was growing fast. A year after the appearance of his 
two poems the dramatic company at Blackfriars, in which he was a part- 
ner as well as actor, built their new theatre of the Globe on the Bankside ; 
and four years later he was rich enough to aid his father, and buy the 
house at Stratford which afterwards became his home. The tradition that 
EHzabeth was so pleased with Falstaff in " Henry the Fourth " that she 
ordered the poet to show her Falstaff in love — an order which produced 
the *^ Merry Wives of Windsor " — whether true or false, shows his repute 
as a playwright. As the group of earlier poets passed away, they 
found successors in Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, and 
Chapman, and above all in Ben Jonson. But none of these could 
dispute the supremacy of Shakspere. The verdict of Meres in 1598, 
that " Shakspere among the English is the most excellent in both kinds 
for the stage," represented the general feehng of his contemporaries. 
He was fully master at last of the resources of his art. The 
"Merchant of Venice" marks the perfection of his development as 
a dramatist in the completeness of its stage effect, the ingenuity 
of its incidents, the ease of its movement, the poetic beauty of its 
higher passages, the reserve and self-control with which its poetry 
is used, the conception and development of character, and above 



The Eliza- 

BETHAF 

Poets. 



426 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



1601. 



1602. 



all the mastery with which character and event is grouped round 
the figure of Shylock. But the poet's temper is still young ; the 
"Merry Wives of Windsor" is a burst of gay laughter; and laughter 
more tempered, yet full of a sweeter fascination, rings round us in " As 
You Like It." But in the melancholy and meditative Jaques of the 
last drama we feel the touch of a new and graver mood. Youth, so full 
and buoyant in the poet till now, seems to have passed almost suddenly 
away. Shakspere had nearly reached forty ; and in one of his Sonnets, 
which cannot have been written at a much later time than this, there 
are indications that he already felt the advance of premature age. The 
outer world suddenly darkened around him ; the brilliant circle of young 
nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up by the political 
storm which burst in the mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for 
power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold ; his friend and Shakspere's 
idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower ; Herbert, Lord 
Pembroke, the poefs younger patron, was banished from Court. 
Hard as it is to read the riddle of the Essex rising, we know that to 
some of the younger and more chivalrous minds of the age it seemed 
a noble effort to rescue England from intriguers who were gathering 
round the Queen ; and in this effort Shakspere seems to have taken 
part. The production of his play of " Richard the Second " at the 
theatre was one of the means adopted by the conspirators to prepare 
the nation for the revolution they contemplated ; and the suspension of 
the players, on the suppression of the revolt, marks the Government's 
opinion as to the way their sympathies had gone. While friends were 
thus falling and hopes fading without, the poef s own mind seems to 
have been going through a phase of bitter suffering and unrest. In 
spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult and even imp(^sible 
to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history from the Sonnets ; 
" the strange imagery of passion which passes over the magic mirror," 
it has been finely said, " has no tangible evidence before or behind it ; " 
but its mere passing is itself an evidence of the restlessness and agony 
within. The change in the character of his dramas gives a surer 
indication of his change of mood. "There seems to have been a 
period in Shakspere's life,'' says Mr. Hallam, " when his heart was ill 
at ease, and ill content with the world and his own conscience ; the 
memory of hours misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or un- 
requited, the experience of man's worser nature which intercourse with 
unworthy associates by choice or circumstances peculiarly teaches, 
these as they sank down into the depth of his great mind seem not 
only to have inspired into it the conception of Lear or Timon, but 
that of one primary character — the censurer of mankind. This type 
is first seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jacques, gazing with an 
undiminished serenity and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of 
manners, on the foUies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



427 



exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the 
Duke in ' Measure for Measure/ In all these, however, it is merely 
contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet this is mingled with the 
impulses of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary 
circumstances ; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with a 
steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety and 
extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across 
the incongruous imagery of madness ; in Timon it is obscured by 
the exaggeration of misanthropy." 

The ^' obstinate questionings of invisible things " which had given 
their philosophical cast to the wonderful group of dramas which had 
at last raised Shakspere to his post among the greatest of the world's 
poets, still hung round him in the years of quiet retirement which pre- 
ceded his death. The wealth he had amassed as actor, stage-proprietor, 
and author enabled him to purchase a handsome property at Stratford, 
the home of his youth, which, if we may trust tradition, he had never 
failed to visit once a year since he left it to seek his fortune on the 
London boards. His last dramas, " Othello,'' the " Tempest," " C^sar," 
" Antony," " Coriolanus," were written in the midst of ease and com- 
petence, in the home where he lived as a country gentleman with his 
wife and daughters. His classical plays were the last assertion 
of an age which was passing away. The spirit of the Renascence 
was fading before the spirit of the Reformation. Puritanism was 
hardening and narrowing, while it was invigorating and ennobling, life 
by its stern morality, its seriousness, its conviction of the omnipotence 
of God and of the weakness of man. The old daring which had 
turned England into a people of " adventurers," the sense of inex 
haustible resources in the very nature of man, the buoyant freshness 
of youth, the intoxicating sense of beauty and joy, which had created 
Drake and Sidney and Marlowe, were dying with Shakspere himself. 
The Bible was superseding Plutarch. The pedantry of Euphuism 
was giving way to the pedantry of Scriptural phrases. The " obstinate 
questionings of invisible things," which haunted the finer minds of 
the Renascence, were being stereotyped into the theological formulas 
of the Predestinarian. A new political world, healthier, more really 
national, but less picturesque, less wrapt in the mystery and splendour 
which poets love, was rising with the new moral world. Rifts which 
were still little were widening hour by hour, and threatening ruin to the 
great fabric of Church and State, which Elizabeth had built up, and to 
which the men of the Renascence clung passionately. From all this 
new world of feeling and action Shakspere stood utterly aloof. Of the 
popular tendencies of Puritanism — and great as were its faults, Puritan- 
ism may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognized 
the grandeur of the people as a whole — Shakspere knew nothing 
In his earlier dramas he had reflected the common faith of his ag^ 



The Eliza- 

BETHAN 
POETS. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



in the grandeur of Kingship as the one national centre ; in his 
later plays he represents the aristocratic view of social life which 
was shared by all the nobler spirits of the Elizabethan time. Corio- 
lanus is the embodiment of a great noble ; and the reiterated taunts 
which he hurls in play after play at the rabble only echo the general 
temper of the Renascence. Nor were the spiritual sympathies of the 
poet those of the coming time. While the world was turning more 
and more to the speculations of theology, man and man's nature 
remained to the last the one inexhaustible subject of interest with 
Shakspere, as it had been with his favourite Montaigne. Caliban 
was his latest creation. It is impossible to discover whether his faith, 
if faith there were, was Catholic or Protestant. It is difficult, indeed, 
to say whether he had any religious belief or no. The religious 
phrases which are thinly scattered over his works are little more 
than expressions of a distant and imaginative reverence. And on 
the deeper grounds of religious faith his silence is significant. He 
is silent, and the doubt of Hamlet deepens his silence, about the 
after-world. " To die," it may be, was to him as to Claudio, " to 
go we know not where." Often, at any rate, as his " questionings " 
turn to the riddle of life and death, he leaves it a riddle to the last, 
without heeding the common theological solutions around him. *^ We 
are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded 
by a sleep." 

The contrast between the spirit of the Elizabethan drama and the 
new temper of the nation became yet stronger when the death of 
Shakspere left the sovereignty of the English stage to Ben Jonson, 
Jonson retained it almost to the moment when the drama itself perished 
in the storm of the Civil War. Webster and Ford, indeed, surpassed 
him in tragic grandeur, Mas singer in facility and grace, Beaumont 
and Fletcher in poetry and inventiveness ; but in the breadth of his 
dramatic quality, his range over every kind of poetic excellence, 
Jonson was excelled by Shakspere alone. His life retained to the 
last the riotous, defiant colour of the earlier dramatic world, in which 
he had made his way to fame. The stepson of a bricklayer, then 
a poor Cambridge scholar, he enlisted as a volunteer in the wars 
of the Low Countries, killed his man in single combat in sight of 
both armies, and returned at nineteen to London to throw himself on 
the stage for bread. At forty-five he was still so vigorous that he 
made his way to Scotland on foot. Even in old age his " mountain 
belly," his scarred face, and massive frame became famous among 
the men of a younger time, as they gathered at the " Mermaid " to listen 
to his wit, his poetry, his outbursts of spleen and generosity, of 
delicate fancy, of pedantry, of riotous excess. His entry on the stage 
was marked by a proud resolve to reform it. Already a fine scholar 
in early manhood, and disdainful of writers who, like Shakspere, 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION". 



429 



The Eliza- 

3ETHAN 

Poets. 



"knew little Latin and less Greek," Jonson aimed at a return to Sec. vil. 
classic severity, to a severer criticism and taste. He blamed the ' 
extravagance which marked the poetry around him, he studied his 
plots, he gave symmetr>^ and regularity to his sentences and concise- 
ness to his phrase. But creativeness disappears : in his social comedies 
we are amongst quahties and types rather than men, among abstrac- 
tions and not characters. His comedy is no genial reflection of hfe 
as it is, but a moral, satirical effort to reform manners. It is only his 
wonderful grace and real poetic feeling that lightens all this pedantry. 
He shares the vigour and buoyancy of life which distinguished the 
school from which he sprang. His stage is thronged with figures. In 
spite of his talk about correctness, his own extravagance is only saved 
from becoming ridiculous by his amazing force. If he could not 
create characters, his wealth of striking details gave life to the types 
which he substituted for them. His poetry, too, is of the highest 
order ; his lyrics of the purest, lightest fancy : his masques rich 
with gorgeous pictures; his pastoral, the ''Sad Shepherd," fragment 
as it is, breathes a delicate tenderness. But, in spite of the beauty 
and strength which lingered on, the life of our drama was fast 
ebbing away. The interest of tha people w^as in reality being drawn 
to newer and graver themes, as the struggle of the Great Rebellion 
threw its shadow before it, and the efforts of the playwrights to arrest 
this tendency of the time by fresh excitement only brought about the 
ruin of the stage. The grossness of the later comedy is incredible. 
Almost as incredible is the taste of the later tragedians for horrors of 
incest and blood. The hatred of the Puritans to the stage was not a 
mere longing to avenge the taunts and insults which the stage had 
levelled at Puritanism ; it was in the main the honest hatred of God- 
fearing men against the foulest depravity presented in a poetic and 
attractive form. 



Section. VIII.— The Conquest of Ireland. 1588—1610. 

^Authorities. — The materials for the early history of Ireland are described by 
Professor O'Curry in his "'Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History," 
Dublin, 1 86 1. They may be most conveniently studied by the general reader 
in the conpilation known as ''' The Annals of the Four Masters " (Dublin, 1856) 
edited by Dr. O'Donovan. Its ecclesiastical history is drily but accurately 
told by Dr. Lanigan (''Ecclesiastical History of Ireland," Dublin, 1829). 
The chief authorities for the earlier conquest under Henry the Second are the 
"Expugnatio et Topographia Hibernica," excellently edited for the Rolls 
Series by Mr. Dimock, and the Anglo-Norman Poem edited by M. Francisque 
Michel (London, Pickering, 1857). jMr. Froude has devoted especial attention 
to the relations of Ireland with the Tudors ; but both in accuracy and soundness 
of judgment his work is far inferior to oMr. Brewer's examination of them in 
his prefaces to the State Papers of Henry the Eighth, or to Mr. Gardiner's 
careful and temperate account of the final conquest ;and settlement under 



430 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



^^589- 



Mountjoy and Chichester (*' History of England from the Accession of James 
the First"). The two series of '^ Lectures on the History of Ireland" by Mr. 
A. G. Richey are remarkable for their information and fairness.] 



While England became "a nest of singing birds " at home, the last 
years of Elizabeth's reign were years of splendour and triumph 
abroad. With the defeat of the Armada began a series of victories 
which broke the power of Spain, and changed the political aspect 
of the world. The exhaustion of the Royal Treasury indeed soon 
forced Elizabeth to content herself with issuing commissions to volun- 
teers, but the war was a national one, and the nation waged it for 
itself. In the year after the ruin of the Armada two hundred vessels 
and twenty thousand volunteers gathered at their own cost at Ply^ 
mouth, under the command of Drake and N orris, plundered Corunna, 
and insulted the Spanish coast. A new buccaneering expedition, which 
made its way to the West Indies under Drake, captured the Spanish 
galleons, and levied contributions on the rich merchant-cities of the 
:olonies, Philip was roused by the insult to new dreams of invasion, 
^ out his threat of a fresh Armada was met by a daring descent of the 
English forces upon Cadiz. The town was plundered and burnt to the 
; ground ; thirteen vessels of war were fired in its harbour, and the 
I stores accumulated for the expedition utterly destroyed. In spite of 
; ,;his crushing blow a Spanish fleet gathered in the following year and 
5et sail for the English coast ; but as in the case of its predecessor, 
storms proved more fatal than the English guns, and the ships were 
ivrecked and almost destroyed in the Bay of Biscay. From this 
' moment it was through France, rather than by a direct attack, that 
Philip hoped to reach England. The Armada had hardly been 
; dispersed, when the assassination of Henry the Third, the last of the 
line of Valois, raised Henry of Navarre to the throne ; and the accession 
of a Protestant sovereign at once ranged the Catholics of France to a 
man on the side of the League and its leaders, the Guises. The 
League rejected Henry's claims as those of a heretic, admitted the 
I ridiculous pretensions which PhiHp advanced to the vacant throne, 
land received the support of Spanish soldiery and Spanish treasure. 
This new effort of Spain, an effort whose triumph must have ended 
in her ruin, forced Elizabeth to aid Henry with men and money in his 
seven years' struggle against the overwhelming odds which seemed 
arrayed against him ; but valuable as was her support, it was by the 
King's amazing courage and energy that victory was at last wrested 
from his foes. In spite of religious passion, the national spirit of 
France revolted more and more from the rule of C^ ain, and the King's 
submission to the faith held by the bulk of his subjects at last destroyed 
all chance of Philip's success. "Paris is well worth a mass" was the 



II 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION. 



431 



famous phrase in which Henry explained his abandonment of the 
Protestant cause, but the step did more than secure Paris. It at once 
dashed to the ground all hopes of further resistance, it dissolved the 
League, and enabled the King at the head of a reunited people to force 
Philip to acknowledge his title and to consent to peace in the Treaty 
of Vervins. 

With the ruin of Philip's projects in France and the assertion of 
English supremacy at sea, all danger from Spain passed quietly away, 
and Ehzabeth was able to direct her undivided energies to the last 
work which illustrates her reign. 

To understand however the final conquest of Ireland, we must retrace 
our steps to the reign of Henry the Second. The civilization of the 
island had at that time fallen far below the height which it had reached 
when its missionaries brought religion and learning to the shores of 
Northumbria. Learning had almost disappeared. The Christianity 
which had been a vital force in the eighth century had died into 
asceticism and superstition in the twelfth, and had ceased to influence 
the morality of the people at large. The Church, destitute of any 
effective organization, was powerless to do the work which it had done 
elsewhere in Western Europe, or to introduce order into the anarchy of 
warring tribes. On the contrary, it shared the anarchy around it. 
Its head, the Coarb, or Archbishop of Armagh, sank into the here- 
ditary chieftain of a clan ; its bishops were without dioceses, and often 
mere dependants of the greater monasteries. Hardly a trace of 
any central authority remained to knit the tribes into a single nation, 
though the King of Ulster claimed supremacy over his fellow-kings of 
Munster, Leinster, and Connaught ; and even within these minor 
kingships the regal authority was little more than a name. The one 
living thing in the social and political chaos was the sept, or tribe, err 
elan, whose institutions remained those of the earliest stage of human 
civilization. Its chieftainship was hereditary', but, instead of passing 
from father to son, it was held by whoever was the eldest member of 
the ruling family at the time. The land belonging to the tribe w^as 
shared among its members, but re-divided among them at certain in- 
tervals of years. The practice of " fosterage," or adoption, bound the 
adopted child more closely to its foster-parents than to its family by 
blood. Whatever elements of improvement or progress had been in- 
troduced into the island at an earlier time disappeared in the long and 
destructive struggle with the Danes. The coast-towns, such as Dublin 
or Waterford, which the invaders founded, remained Danish in 
blood and manners, and at feud with the Celtic tribes around them, 
though sometimes forced by the fortunes of war to pay tribute, and to 
accept, in name at least, the overlordship of the Irish Kings. It was 
through these towns however that the intercourse with England, which 
had practically ceased since the eighth century, was to some extent 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



IJ^O. 



renewed. Cut off from the native Church of the island by national 
antipathy, the Danish coast-cities applied to the See of Canterbury for 
the ordination of their bishops, and acknowledged a right of spiritual 
supervision in Lanfranc and Anselm. The relations thus formed were 
drawn closer by the slave-trade, which the Conqueror and Bishop 
Wulfstan succeeded for a time in suppressing at Bristol, but which 
appears to have quickly revived. At the time of Henry the Second^s 
accession Ireland was full of EngHshmen, who had been kidnapped 
and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and the spiritual 
menaces of the English Church. The slave-trade afforded a legitimate 
pretext for war, had a pretext been needed by the ambition of Henry the 
Second ; and within a few months of that King^s coronation John of Salis- 
bury was despatched to obtain the Papal sanction for his invasion of 
the island. The enterprise, as it was laid before Pope Hadrian IV., took 
the colour of a crusade. The isolation of Ireland from the general 
body of Christendom, the absence of learning and civilization, the scan- 
dalous vices of its people, were alleged as the grounds of Henry's 
action. It was the general belief of the time that all islands fell under 
the jurisdiction of the Papal See, and it was as a possession of the 
Roman Church that Henry sought Hadrian's permission to enter 
Ireland. His aim was " to enlarge the bounds of the Church, to re- 
strain the progress of vices, to correct the manners of its people and 
to plant virtue among them, and to increase the Christian religion."' 
He engaged to "subject the people to laws, to extirpate vicious 
customs, to respect the rights of the native Churches, and to enforce 
the payment of Peter's pence " as a recognition of the overlordship of 
the Roman See. Hadrian by his bull approved the enterprise as one 
prompted by " the ardour of faith and love of religion," and declared 
his will that the people of Ireland should receive Henry with all 
honour, and revere him as their lord. The Papal bull was produced 
in a great council of the English baronage, but the opposition was 
strong enough to force on Henry a temporary abandonment of his 
schemes, and his energies were diverted for the moment to plans of 
continental aggrandizement. 

Fourteen years had passed when an Irish chieftain, Dermot, King of 
Leinster, presented himself at Henry's Court, and did homage to him 
for the dominions from which he had been driven in one of the endless 
civil wars which distracted the island. Dermot returned to Ireland with 
promises of aid from the English knighthood ; and was soon followed 
by Robert Fitz Stephen, a son of the Constable of Cardigan, with a 
small band of a hundred and forty knights, sixty men-at-arms, and 
three or four hundred • Welsh archers. Small as was the number of 
the adventurers, their horses and arms proved irresistible to the Irish 
kernes ; a sally of the men of Wexford was avenged by the storm of 
their town ; the Ossory clans were defeated with a terrible slaughter. 



THE REFORMATION. 



433 



and Dermot, seizing a head from the heap of trophies which his men 
piled at his feet, tore off in savage triumph its nose and Hps with 
his teeth. The arrival of fresh forces heralded the coming of Richard 
of Clare, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, a ruined baron who bore the 
nickname of Strongbow, and who in defiance of Henry's prohibition 
landed with a force of fifteen hundred men, as Dermot's mercenary, near 
Waterford. The city was at once stormed, and the united forces of 
the Earl and King marched to the siege of Dublin. In spite of a 
relief attempted by the King of Connaught, who was recognized as 
overking of the island by the rest of the tribes, Dublin was taken 
by surprise ; and the marriage of Earl Richard with Eva, Dermot's 
daughter, left him on the death of his father-in-law, which followed 
quickly on these successes, master of his kingdom of Leinster. The 
new lord had soon, however, to hurry back to England, and appease 
the jealousy of Henry by the surrender of Dublin to the Crown, by 
doing homage for Leinster as an English lordship, and by accom- 
panying the King in his voyage to the new dominion which the 
adventurers had won. Had Henry been allowed by fortune to carry 
out his purpose, the conquest of Ireland would now have been accom- 
plished. The King of Connaught indeed and the chiefs of Ulster 
refused him homage, but the rest of the Irish tribes owned his 
suzerainty ; the bishops in synod at Cashel recognized him as their 
lord ; and he was preparing to penetrate to the north and west, and 
to secure his conquest by a systematic erection of castles throughout 
the country, when the troubles which followed on the murder of 
Archbishop Thomas recalled him hurriedly to Noimandy. The lost 
opportunity never again arrived. Connaught, indeed, bowed to a 
nominal acknowledgment of Henry's overlordship ; John De Courcy 
penetrated into Ulster and established himself at Downpatrick ; and 
the King planned for a while the establishment of his youngest son, 
John, as Lord of Ireland. But the levity of the young prince, who 
mocked the rude dresses of the native chieftains, and plucked them in 
insult by the beard, compelled his recall ; and nothing but the feuds 
and weakness of the Irish tribes enabled the adventurers to hold the 
districts of Drogheda, DubUn, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork, which 
formed what was known as the " English Pale." 

Had the Irish driven their invaders into the sea, or the English 
succeeded in the complete conquest of Ireland, the misery of its after 
history might have been avoided. A struggle such as that of Scotland 
under Bruce might have produced a spirit of patriotism and national 
union, which would have formed a people out of the mass of warring 
clans. A conquest such as that of England by the Normans would 
have spread at any rate the law, the order, the peace, and civilization 
of the conquering country over the length and breadth of the con- 
quered UuhappUy Ireland, while powerless to effect its dehverance, 

F F 



434 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[ ".HAK 



was strong enough to hold its assailants at bay. The country was 
broken into two halves, whose conflict has never ceased. The bar- 
barism of the native tribes was only intensified by their hatred of 
the civilized intruders. The intruders themselves, penned up in the 
narrow limits of the Pale, fell rapidly to the level of the Irish barbarism. 
All the lawlessness, the ferocity, the narrowness of feudalism broke out 
unchecked in the horde of adventurers who held the land by their 
sword. It needed the stern vengeance of John, v/hose army stormed 
their strongholds, and drove the leading barons into exile, to preserve 
even their fealty to the English Crown. John divided the Pale into 
counties, and ordered the observance of the English law; but the 
departure of his army was the signal for a return of the anarchy 
which he had trampled under foot. Every Irishman without the Pale 
was deemed an enemy and a robber, nor was his murder cognizable 
by the law. Half the subsistence of the barons was drawn from their 
forays across the border, and these forays were avenged by incursions 
of native marauders, which carried havoc to the walls of Dublin. 
The English settlers in the Pale itself were harried and oppressed by 
enemy and protector alike ; while the feuds of baron with baron 
wasted their strength, and prevented any effective combination against 
the Irish enemy. The landing of a Scotch force after Bannochburn with 
Edward Bruce at its head, and a general rising of the clans on its 
appearance, drove indeed the barons to a momentary union ; and in 
the bloody field of Athenry their valour was proved by the slaughter 
of eleven thousand of their foes, and the almost complete extinction of 
the great sept of the O'Connors. But with victory returned anarchy 
and degradation. The barons sank more and more into Irish chieftains ; 
the FitzMaurices, who became Earls of Desmond, and whose great 
territory in the south was erected into a County Palatine, adopted the 
dress and manners of the natives around them ; and the provisions of 
the Statute of Kilkenny were fruitless to check the growth of this 
evil. The Statute forbade the adoption by any man of English blood 
of the Irish language or name or dress ; it enforced the use of English 
law, and made that of the native or Brehon law, which had crept 
into the Pale, an act of treason ; it made treasonable any marriage 
of the Englishry with persons of Irish blood, or any adoption n 
English children by Irish foster-fathers. The anxiety with whicn 
the English Government watched the degradation which its laws failed 
to avert stirred it at last to a serious effort for the conquest and 
organization of the island. In one of the intervals of peace which 
chequered his stormy reign, Richard the Second landed with an army 
of overpowering strength, before the advance of which into the interior 
all notion of resistance was quickly abandoned. Seventy-five chiefs 
of clans did him homage ; and the four overkings of the island followed 
him to Dublin, and submitted to receive the order of Knighthood 



VIL] 



THE REFORMATION. 



435 



The King devoted himself eagerly to the v/ork of forming an effective 
government by the enforcement of the laws, the removal of tyrannical 
officers, and the conciliation of the native tribes ; but the troubles in 
England soon interrupted his efforts, and all traces of his work vanished 
with the embarkation of his soldiers. 

With the renewal of the French wars, and the outburst of the Wars 
of the Roses, Ireland was again left to itself. The poHcy of Henry 
the Seventh threw power without stint into the hands of the nobles of 
the Pale. When the Earl of Desmond defied the authority of the 
Government, Henry made him Lord Deputy. " All Ireland cannot rtile 
this man," complained the Council. " Then shall he rule all Ireland,^' 
rephed the King. In the opening of his successor's reign Enghsh 
influence reached its lowest point of depression. The great Norman 
lords of the south, the Butlers and Geraldines, the De la Poers 
and the Fitzpatricks, though subjects in name, were in fact defiant 
of royal authority. In manners and outer seeming they had sunk 
into mere natives ; their feuds were as incessant as those of the Irish 
septs ; and their despotism over the miserable inhabitants of the 
Pale combined the horrors of feudal oppression with those of Celtic 
anarchy. Crushed by taxation, by oppression, by misgovernment, 
plundered alike by Celtic marauders and by the troops levied to 
disperse them^ the wretched descendants of the first English settlers 
preferred even Irish misrule to English " order," and the border of the 
Pale retreated steadily towards Dublin. The towns of the seaboard, 
sheltered by their walls and their municipal self-government, formed 
the only exceptions to the general chaos ; elsewhere throughout its 
dominions the English Government, though still strong enough to 
break down any open revolt, was a mere phantom of rule. From the 
Celtic tribes without the Pale even the remnant of civilization and of 
native union which had lingered on to the time of Strongbow had 
vanished away. The feuds of the Irish septs were as bitter as their 
hatred of the stranger ; and the Government at Dublin found it easy to 
maintain a strife, which saved it the necessity of self-defence, among a 
people whose " nature is such that for money one shall have the son 
to war against his father, and the father against his child.'' During 
or.^ first thirty years of the sixteenth century, the annals of the country 
Which remained under native rule record more than a hundred raids 
and battles between clans of the north alone. But the time was at 
last come for a vigorous attempt on the part of England to introduce 
order into this chaos of turbulence and misrule. To Henry the 
Eighth the policy which had been pursued by his father was utterly 
hateful. His purpose was to rule in Ireland as thoroughly and effec- 
tively as he ruled in England, and during the latter half of his reign 
he bent his whole energies to accomplish this aim. From the first 
hours of his accession, indeed, the Irish lords felt the heavier hand 

F F 2 



436 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



of a master ; and the Geraldines, who had been suffered under the 
preceding reign to govern Ireland in the nan-je of the Crown, were 
quick to discover that the Crown would no longer stoop to be their 
tool. They resolved^to frighten England again into a conviction of its 
helplessness ; and the rising of Lord Thomas Fitzgerald followed the 
usual fashion of Irish revolts. A murder of the Archbishop of Dublin, 
a capture of the city, a repulse before its castle, a harrying of the Pale, 
ended in a sudden disappearance of the rebels among the bogs and 
forests of the border on the advance of the English forces. It had been 
usual to meet such an onset as this by a raid of the same character, 
by a corresponding failure before the castle of the rebellious noble, 
and a retreat like his own, which served as a preliminary to negotia- 
tions and a compromise. Unluckily for the Geraldines, Henry had 
resolved to take Ireland seriously in hand, and he had Cromwell to 
execute his will. Skeffington, the new Lord Deputy, brought with him 
a train of artillery, which worked a startling change in the political 
aspect of the island. The castles which had hitherto sheltered rebellion 
were battered into ruins. Maynooth, the impregnable stronghold from 
which the Geraldines threatened Dublin, and ruled the Pale at their 
will, was beaten down in a fortnight. So crushing and unforeseen 
was the blow that resistance was at once at an end. Not only was the 
power of the great Norman house which had towered over Ireland 
utterly broken, but only a single boy was left to preserve its name. 

With the fall of the Geraldines Ireland felt itself in a master's 
grasp. ''^ Irishmen," wrote one of the Lord Justices to Cromwell, " were 
never in such fear as now. The King's sessions are being kept in five 
shires more than formerly." Not only were the Englishmen of the Pale 
at Henry's feet, but the kernes of Wicklow and Wexford sent in their 
submission ; and for the first time in men's memory an English army 
appeared in Munster and reduced the south to obedience. The great 
castle of the O'Briens, which guarded the passage of the Shannon, was 
carried by assault, and its fall carried with it the submission of Clare. 
The capture of Athlone brought about the reduction of Connaught, 
and assured the loyalty of the great Norman house of the De Burghs 
or Bourkes, who had assumed an almost Royal authority in the west. 
The resistance of the tribes of the north was broken in the victoiy 
of Bellahoe. In seven years, partly through the vigour of Skeffington's 
successor. Lord Leonard Grey, and still more through the resolute 
will of Henry and Cromwell, the power of the Crown, which had been 
limited to the walls of Dubhn, was acknowledged over the length and 
breadth of Ireland. But submission was far from being all that Henry 
desired. His aim was to civihze the people whom he had conquered — 
to rule not by force but by law. But the only conception of law which 
the King or his ministers could frame was that of English law. The 
customary law which prevailed without the Pale, the native system of 



VII.] 



THE RE FORM A TIOiV. 



437 



clan government and common tenure of land by the tribe, as well as the 
poetry and literature which threw their lustre over the Irish tongue, were 
either unknown to the EngHsh statesmen, or despised by them as bar- 
barous. The one mode of civihzing Ireland and redressing its chaotic 
misrule which presented itself to their minds, was that of destroying 
the whole Celtic tradition of the Irish people — that of "making Ireland 
liLnglish^' in manners, in law, and in tongue. The Deputy, Parhament, 
Judges, Sheriffs, which already existed within the Pale, furnished 
a faint copy of English institutions ; and these, it was hoped, might be 
gradually extended over the whole island. The English language and 
mode of life would follow, it was believed, the English law. The one 
effectual way of bringing about such a change as this lay in a complete 
conquest of the island, and in its colonization by English settlers ; but 
from this course, pressed on him as it was by his own lieutenants and 
by the settlers of the Pale, even the iron will of Henry shrank. It 
was at once too bloody and too expensive. To win over the chiefs, to 
turn them by policy and a patient generosity into English nobles, to 
use the traditional devotion of their tribal dependents as a means of 
diffusing the new civilization of their chiefs, to trust to time and 
steady government for the gradual reformation of the country, was a 
policy safer, cheaper, more humane, and more statesmanlike. It was 
this system which, even before the fall of the Geraldines, Henry had 
resolved to adopt ; and it was this which he pressed on Ireland when 
the conquest laid it at his feet. The chiefs were to be persuaded of 
the advantage of justice and legal rule. Their fear of any purpose to 
"expel them from their lands and dominions lawfully possessed" was 
to be dispelled by a promise " to conserve them as their own." Even 
their remonstrances against the introduction of English law were to 
be regarded, and the course of justice to be enforced or mitigated 
according to the circumstances of the country. In the resumption of 
lands or rights which clearly belonged to the Crown " sober ways 
politic shifts, and amiable persuasions " were to be preferred to rigorous 
dealing. It was this system of conciliation which was in the main 
can-ied out by the English Government under Henry and his two 
successors. Chieftain after chieftain was won over to the acceptance 
of the indenture which guaranteed him in the possession of his lands, 
and left his authority over his tribesmen untouched, on conditions of a 
pledge of loyalty, of abstinence from illegal wars and exactions on his 
fellow- subjects, and of rendering a fixed tribute and service in war-time 
to the Crown. The sole test of loyalty demanded was the acceptance 
of an English title, and the education of a son at the English court ; 
though in some cases, like that of the O'Neills, a promise was exacted 
to use the English language and dress, and to encourage tillage and 
husbandry. Compliance with conditions such as these was procured, 
not merely by the terror of the Royal name, but by heavy bribes. The 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



chieftains in fact profited greatly by the change. Not only were the 
lands of the suppressed abbeys granted to them on their assumption 
of their new titles, but the English law-courts, ignoring the Irish 
custom by which the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded 
the chiefs as sole proprietors of the soil. 

The assumption by Henry of the title of King of Ireland, in the 
place of the older title of Lord, which followed naturally on his quarrel 
with the Papacy, was the fitting crown of the new system. The merits 
of the system were unquestionable ; its faults were such as a statesman 
of that day could hardly be expected to perceive. The prohibition of 
the national dress, customs, laws, and language must have seemed to 
the Tudor poHticians merely the suppression of a barbarism which 
stood in the way of all improvement ; and the error of their attempt 
could only be felt, if felt at all, in the districts without the Pale. 
Their firm and conciliatory policy must in the end have won, but for 
the fatal blunder which plunged Ireland into religious strife at the 
moment when her civil strife seemed about to come to an end. Ever 
since Strongbow's landing there had been no one Irish Church, simply 
because there had been no one Irish nation. There was not the 
slightest difference in doctrine or discipline between the Church 
without the Pale and the Church within it. But within the Pale the 
clergy were exclusively of EngHsh blood and speech, and without it 
they were exclusively of Irish. Irishmen were shut out by law from 
abbeys and churches within the English boundary ; and the ill-will of 
the natives shut out Englishmen from churches and abbeys outside it. 
As to the religious state of the country, it was much on a level with its 
political condition. Feuds and misrule had told fatally on ecclesiastical 
discipline. The bishops were political officers, or hard fighters like the 
chiefs around them ; their sees were neglected, their cathedrals aban- 
doned to decay. Through whole dioceses the churches lay in ruins and 
without priests. The only preaching done in the country was done by 
the begging friars, and in Ireland the numbers of friars' houses were 
few. "If the King do not provide a remedy," it was said in 1525, 
"there will be no more Christentie than in the middle of Turkey." 
Unfortunately the remedy which Henry provided was worse than the 
disease. Politically Ireland was one with England, and the great 
revolution which was severing the one country from the Papacy 
extended itself naturally to the other. The results of it indeed at first 
seemed small enough. The Supremacy, a question which had convulsed 
England, passed over into Ireland to meet its only obstacle in a general 
indifference. Everybody was ready to accept it without a thought 
of its consequences. The bishops and clergy within the Pale bent to 
the King's will as easily as their fellows in England, and their example 
was followed by at least four prelates of dioceses without the Pale. The 
native chieftains made no more scruple than the Lords of the Council 



VII.] 



THE RE FORMA 7 ION. 



439 



in renouncing obedience to the Bishop of Rome, and in acknowledging 
Henry as the ^" Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland 
under Christ." There was none of the resistance to the dissolution of 
the abbeys which had been witnessed on the other side of the Channel, 
and the greedy chieftains showed themselves perfectly willing to share 
the plunder of the Church. But the results of the measure were fatal 
to the little culture and religion which even the past centuries of disorder 
had spared. Such as they were, the religious houses were the only 
schools which Ireland contained. The system of vicars, so general in 
England, was rare in Ireland ; churches in the patronage of the abbeys 
were for the most part served by the religious themselves, and the 
dissolution of their houses suspended pubUc worship over large districts 
of the country. The friars, hitherto the only preachers, and who con- 
tinued to labour and teach in spite of the efforts of the Government, 
were thrown necessarily into a position of antagonism to the English 
rule. 

Had the ecclesiastical changes which were forced on the country 
ended here, however, little harm would in the end have been done. 
But in England the breach with Rome, the destruction of the monastic 
orders, and the establishment of the Supremacy, had roused in the 
people itself a desire for theological change which Henry, however 
grudgingly, had little by little to satisfy. In Ireland the spirit of the 
Reformation never existed among the people at all. They accepted 
the legislative measures passed in the English Parliament without any 
dream of theological consequences, or of any change in the doctrine or 
ceremonies of the Church. Not a single voice demanded the abolition 
of pilgrimages, or the destruction of images, or the reform of public 
worship. The mission of Archbishop Browne ^' for the plucking down 
of idols and extinguishing of idolatry " was the first step in the long 
effort of the English Government to force a new faith on a people who 
to a man clung passionately to their old religion. Browne's attempts at 
^' tuning the pulpits " were met by a sullen and significant opposition. 
^* Neither by gentle exhortation," the Primate wrote to CromweU, "nor 
by evangelical instruction, neither by oath of them solemnly taken, 
nor yet by threats of sharp correction may I persuade or induce any, 
whether religious or secular, since my coming over, once to preach the 
Word of God nor the just title of our illustrious Prince." Even the 
acceptance of the Supremacy, which had been so quietly effected, was 
brought into question when its results became clear. The bishops 
abstained from compliance with the order to erase the Pope's name 
out of their mass-books. The pulpits remained steadily silent. When 
Browne ordered the destruction of the images and relics in his own 
cathedral, he had to report that the prior and canons " find them so 
sweet for their gain that they heed not my words." Cromwell, however, 
was resolute for a religious uniformity between the two islands, and the 



440 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Primate borrowed some of his patron's vigour. Recalcitrant priests 
were thrown into prison, images were plucked down from the roodloft, 
and the most venerable of Irish relics, the Staff of St. Patrick, was burnt 
in the market-place. But he found no support in his vigour, save frora 
across the Channel. The Irish Council was cold. The Lord Deputy 
knelt to say prayers before the Rood at Tuan. A sullen, dogged opposi- 
tion baffled his efforts, till the triumph of the old Catholic party at 
the close of Henry's reign forced him to a brief repose. With the 
accession of Edward the Sixth, however, the system of change was 
renewed with all the energy of Protestant zeal. The bishops were 
summoned before the Deputy, Sir Anthony St. Leger, to receive the 
new EngHsh Liturgy, which, though written in a tongue as strange to 
the native Irish as Latin itself, was now to supersede the Latin service- 
book in every diocese. The order was the signal for an open strife. 
" Now shall every illiterate fellow read Mass," burst forth Dowding, 
the Archbishop of Armagh, as he flung out of the chamber with all bot 
one of his suffragans at his heels. Browne, on the other hand, was 
followed in his profession of obedience by the Bishops of Meath, 
Limerick, and Kildare. The Government, however, was far from 
quailing before the division of the episcopate. Dowding was driven 
from the country, and the vacant sees were filled with Protestants like 
Bale, of the most advanced type. But no change could be wrought 
by measures such as these on the opinions of the people themselves. 
The new episcopal reformers spoke no Irish, and of their English 
sermons not a word was understood by the rude kernes around the 
pulpit. The native priests remained silent. "As for preaching we have 
none," reports a zealous Protestant, " without which the ignorant can 
have no knowledge." The prelates who used the new prayer-book 
were simply regarded as heretics. The Bishop of Meath was assured 
by one of his flock that, " if the country wist how, they would eat 
you." Protestantism had failed to wrest a single Irishman from his 
older convictions, but it succeeded in uniting all Ireland against the 
Crown. The old political distinctions which had been produced by 
the conquest of Strongbow faded before the new struggle for a 
common faith. The population within the Pale and without it became 
one, "not as the Irish nation," it has been acutely said, "but as 
Catholics." A new sense of national identity was found in the identity 
of religion. " Both English and Irish begin to oppose your Lordship's 
orders," wrote Browne to Cromwell, " and to lay aside their national 
old quarrels." 

With the accession of Mary the shadowy form of this earlier Irish 
Protestantism melted quietly away. There were no Protestants in 
Ireland save the new Bishops ; and when Bale had fled over the sea, 
and his fellow-prelates had been deprived, the Church resumed its* old 
appearance. No attempt, indeed, was made to restore the monasteries ; 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION, 



441 



and Mary exercised her supremacy, deposed and appointed bishops, 
and repudiated Papal interference with her ecclesiastical acts, as 
vigorously as her father. But the Mass was restored, the old modes of 
religious worship were again held in honour, and religious dissension 
between the Government and its Irish subjects was for the time at an 
end. With the close, however, of one danger came the rise of another, 
England was growing tired of the policy of conciliation which had 
been steadily pursued by Henry the Eighth and his successor. As 
yet it had been rewarded with precisely the sort of success which 
Wolsey had anticipated : the chiefs had come quietly in to the plan, 
and their septs had followed them in submission to the new order. 
" The winning of the Earl of Desmond was the winning of the rest of 
Munster with small charges. The making O'Brien an Earl made all 
that county obedient.^' The Macwilliam became Lord Clanrickard, 
and the Fitzpatricks Barons of Upper Ossory. The visit of the 
great northern chief, who had accepted the title of Earl of Tyrone, 
to the English Court was regarded as a marked step in the process 
of civilization. In the south, where the system of English law was 
slowly spreading, the chieftains sate on the bench side by side 
with the English justices of the peace ; and somethin^^ had been 
done to check the feuds and disorder of the wild tribes between 
Limerick and Tipperary. " Men may pass quietly throughout these 
countries without danger of robbery or other displeasure." In the 
Clanrickard county, once wasted with war, " ploughing increaseth 
daily." In Tyrone and the north, indeed, the old disorder reigned 
without a check ; and everywhere the process of improvement tried the 
temper of the English Deputies by the slowness of its advance. The 
only hope of any real progress lay in patience ; and there were signs 
that the Government at Dublin found it hard to wait. The " rough 
handling" of the chiefs by Sir Edward BeUingham, the Lord Deputy of 
the Protector Somerset, roused a spirit of revolt that only subsided when 
the poverty of the Exchequer forced him to withdraw the garrisons 
he had planted in the heart of the country. Lord Sussex made raid 
after raid to no purpose on the obstinate tribes of the north, burning 
in one the Cathedral of Armagh and three other churches. A far 
more serious breach in the system of concihation was made when the 
project of English colonization which Henry had steadily rejected was 
adopted by the same Lord Deputy. The country of the O'Connors, 
which was assigned to English settlers, was made shire-land under 
the names of King's and Queen's County, in honour of Philip and 
Mary ; and a savage warfare began at once between the planters and 
the dispossessed septs, which only ended in the following reign in the 
extermination of the Irishmen. Commissioners were appointed to 
survey waste lands, with the aim of carrying the work of colonization 
into other districts, when the accession of Elizabeth and the caution 



442 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Cl-IAP. 



of Cecil checked further efforts in this direction, and resumed the safer 
though more tedious poHcy of Henry the Eighth. 

The alarm however at English aggression had already spread among 
the natives ; and its result was seen in a revolt of the north, and 
in the rise of a leader far more vigorous and able than any with whom 
the Government had had as yet to contend. The acceptance of the 
Earldom of Tyrone by the chief of the O'Neills brought about the inevi- 
table conflict between the system of succession recognized by English 
and that recognized by Irish law. On the death of the Earl, England 
acknowledged his eldest son as the heir of his Earldom; while the sept 
maintained their older right of choosing a chief from among the members 
of the family, and preferred a younger son of less doubtful legitimacy. 
Sussex marched northward to settle the question by force of arms ; but 
ere he could reach Ulster the activity of Shane O'Neill had quelled the 
disaffection of his rivals, the O'Donnells of Donegal, and won over 
the Scots of Antrim. " Never before," wrote Sussex, "durst Scot or 
Irishman look Englishman in the face in plain or wood since I came 
here ; '' but Shane had fired his men with a new courage, and charging 
the Deputy's army with a force hardly half its number, drove it 
back in rout on Armagh. A promise of pardon induced him to visit 
London, and make an illusory submission, but he was no sooner safe 
home again than its terms were set aside ; and after a wearisome 
struggle, in which Shane foiled the efforts of the Lord Deputy to entrap 
or to poison him, he remained virtually master of the north. His 
success stirred larger dreams of ambition ; he invaded Connaught, 
and pressed Clanrickard hard ; while he replied to the remonstrances 
of the Council at Dublin with a wild defiance. " By the sword I have 
won these lands," he answered, " and by the sword will I keep them." 
But defiance broke idly against the skill and vigour of Sir Henry 
Sidney, who succeeded Sussex as Lord Deputy. The rival septs 
of the north were drawn into a rising against O'Neill, while the English 
army advanced from the Pale ; and Shane, defeated by the O'Donnells, 
took refuge in Antrim, and was hewn to pieces in a drunken squabble 
by his Scottish entertainers. The victory of Sidney won ten years of 
peace for the wretched country ; but Ireland had already been fixed on 
by the CathoUc powers of the Continent as the ground on which they 
could with most advantage fight out their quarrel with Elizabeth. Prac- 
tically indeed the religious question hardly existed there. The religious 
policy of the Protectorate had indeed been resumed on the Queen's ac- 
cession ; Rome was again renounced, the new Act of Uniformity forced 
the English prayer-book on the island, and compelled attendance at the 
services in which it was used. There was as before a general air of com- 
pliance with the law ; even in the districts without the Pale the bishops 
generally conformed, and the only exceptions of which we have any 
information were to be found in the extreme south and in the north, 



THE REFORMATION, 



A ^'7 



wbeie resistance was distant enough to be safe. Eut the real cause of 
this apparent submission to the Act lay in the fact that it remained, 
.1 necessarily remained, a dead letter. It was impossible to find any 
).isiderable number of EngHsh ministers, or of Irish priests acquainted 
with English. Meath was one of the most civilized dioceses, and out 
cA a hundred curates in it hardly ten knew any tongue save their own. 
promise that the service-book should be translated into Irish was 
nt '. :r fulfilled, and the final clause of the Act itself authorized the use of 
a Latin rendering of it till further order could be taken. But this, like 
its other provisions, was ignored, and throughout Elizabeth's reign the 
gentry of the Pale went unquestioned to Mass. There was in fact no re- 
ligious persecution, and in the many complaints of Shane O'Neill we find 
no mention of a religious grievance. But this was far from being the 
view of Rome or of Spain, of the Jesuit missionaries, or of the Irish 
exiles abroad. They represented, and perhaps believed, the Irish 
people to be writhing under a religious oppression which they were burn- 
ing to shake off. They saw in the Irish loyalty to Catholicism a lever 
for overthrowing the great heretic Queen. Stukely, an Irish refugee, 
pressed on the Pope and Spain the policy of a descent on Ireland ; and 
his pressure brought about at last the landing of a small Spanish force 
on the shores of Kerry. In spite however of the arrival of a Papal 
Legate with the blessing of the Holy See, the attempt ended in a miser- 
able failure. The fort of Smerwick, in which the invaders entrenched 
themselves, was forced to surrender, and its garrison put ruthlessly to 
the sword. The Earl of Desmond, who after long indecision rose 
to support them, was defeated and hunted over his own country, 
which the panic-born cruelty of his pursuers harried into a wilderness* 
Pitiless as it was, the work done in Munster spread a terror over the 
land which served England in good stead when the struggle with 
Catholicism culminated in the fight with the Armada ; and not a 
chieftain stirred during that memorable year save to massacre the 
miserable men who were shipwrecked along the coast of Bantry or 
Sligo. 

i The power of the Government was from this moment recognized 
Werywhere throughout the land. But it was a power founded solely 
on terror; and the outrages and exactions of the soldiery, who had been 
flushed with rapine and bloodshed in the south, sowed during the years 
which followed its reduction the seeds of a revolt more formidable 
than any which Elizabeth had yet encountered. The tribes of Ulster, 
divided by the policy of Sidney, were again united by the common 
hatred of their oppressors ; and in Hugh O'Neill they found a leader 
of even greater ability than Shane himself. Hugh had been brought 
up at the English court, and was in manners and bearing an English- 
man ; he had been rewarded for his steady loyalty in previous contests 
by a grant of the Earldom of Tyrone ; and had secured aid from the 



444 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Government, in his contest with a rival chieftain of his clan, by ar 
offer to introduce the English laws and shire-system into his new 
country. But he was no sooner undisputed master of the north than 
his tune gradually changed. Whether from a long-formed plan, or nrom 
suspicion of English designs upon himself, he at last took a position, 
of open defiance. It was at the moment when the Treaty of Vervins, 
and the wreck of the second Armada, freed Elizabeth's hands from 
the struggle with Spain, that the revolt of the great northern tribe of 
the O'Neill broke the quiet which had prevailed since the victories 
of Lord Grey, and forced the Irish question again on the Queen's 
attention. The tide of her recent triumphs seemed at first to have 
turned. A defeat of the English forces in Tyrone brought a general 
rising of the northern tribes ; and a great effort made in the following 
year for the suppression of the growing revolt failed through the vanity, 
and disobedience of the Queen's Lieutenant, the young Earl of Essex, 
a favourite who recompensed her indulgence on his recall by a puerile 
sedition which brought him to the block. His successor, Lord Mount- 
joy, found himself master on his arrival of only a few miles round 
Dublin ; but in three years the revolt was at an end. A Spanish force 
which landed to support it at Kinsale was driven to surrender ; a 
line of forts secured the country as the English mastered it ; all 
open opposition was crushed out by the energy and the ruthlessness 
of the new Lieutenant ; and a famine which followed on his ravages 
completed the devastating work of the sword. Hugh O'Neill was 
brought in triumph to Dublin ; the Earl of Desmond, who had again 
roused Munster into revolt, fled for refuge to Spain ; and the work of 
conquest was at last brought to a close. Under the administration of 
Mountjo/s successor, Sir Arthur Chichester, an able and determined 
effort was made for the settlement of the conquered province by the 
general introduction of a purely English system of government, jus- 
tice, and property. Every vestige of the old Celtic constitution of 
the country was rejected as " barbarous." The tribal authority of the 
chiefs was taken from them by law. They were reduced to the 
position of great nobles and landowners, while their tribesmen rose 
from subjects into tenants, owing only fixed and customary dues and 
services to their lords. The tribal system of property in common 
was set aside, and the communal holdings of the tribesmen turned 
into the copyholds of English law. In the same way the chieftains 
were stripped of their hereditaiy jurisdiction, and the English system 
of judges and trial by jury substituted for their proceedings under 
Brehon or customary lav/. To all this the Celts opposed the tenacious 
obstinacy of their race. Irish juries, then as now, refused to convict. 
Glad as the tribesmen were to be freed from the arbitrary exactions 
of their chiefs, they held them for chieftains still. The attempt made 
by Chichester, under pressure from England, to introduce the Enghsh 



VII.] 



THE REFORMATION. 



445 



•jniformity of religion ended in utter failure ; for the Englishry of the 
Pale remained as Catholic as the native Irishry ; and the sole result 
of the measure was to build up a new Irish people out of both on the 
common basis of religion. Much, however, had been done by the 
firm yet moderate government of the Lieutenant, and signs were 
already appearing of a disposition on the part of the people to conform 
gradually to the new usages, when the English Council under Eliza- 
beth's successor suddenly resolved upon and carried through the great 
revolutionary measure which is known as the Colonization of Ulster. 
The pacific and conservative policy of Chichester was abandoned for 
a vast policy of spoliation ; two-thirds of the north of Ireland was 
declared to have been confiscated to the Crown by the part its 
possessors had taken in a recent effort at revolt ; and the lands which 
were thus gained were allotted to new settlers of Scotch and English 
extraction. In its material results the Plantation of Ulster was 
undoubtedly a brilliant success. Farms and homesteads, churches 
and mills rose fast amidst the desolate wilds of Tyrone. The Corpora- 
tion of London undertook the colonization of Derry, and gave to the 
little town the name which its heroic defence has made so famous. 
The foundations of the economic prosperity which has raised Ulster 
high above the rest of Ireland in wealth and intelligence were un- 
doubtedly laid in the confiscation of 1610 : nor did the measure meet 
with any opposition at the time save that of secret discontent. The 
evicted natives withdrew sullenly to the lands which had been left 
them by the spoiler ; but all faith in English justice had been torn 
from the minds of the Irishry, and the seed had been sown ol that 
fatal harvest of distrust and disaffection, which was to be reaped through 
tyranny and massacre in the age to come. 

The colonization of Ulster has carried us beyond the limits of our 
present story. The triumph of Mountjoy flung its lustre over the 
last days of Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom 
which gathered round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always 
been, her loneliness deepened as she drew towards the grave. The 
statesmen and warriors of her earlier days had dropped one by one 
-from her Council-board ; and their successors were watching her last 
moments, and intriguing for favour in the coming reign. The old 
splendour of her Court waned and disappeared. Only officials re- 
mained about her, ''the other of the Council and nobility estrange 
themselves by all occasions." As she passed along in her progresses, 
the people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The 
'temper of the age, in fact, was changing, and isolating her as it 
changed. Her own England, the England which had grown up 
around her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from this child of 
earth and the Renascence, brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous, irreligious. 
She had enjoyed life as the men of her day enjoyed it, and now that 



Sec. VIII. 

The 
Conquest 

OF 

Ireland 



The 
Death of 
Eliza- 
beth. 



446 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Cpiap. 



they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she 
danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted and 
scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. 
" The Queen,'' wrote a courtier a fpw months before her death, " was 
never so gallant these many years, nor so set upon jollity.'' She per- 
sisted, in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses from country- 
house to country-house. She clung to business as of old, and rated 
in her usual fashion " one who minded not to giving up some matter of 
account." But death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her 
frame shrank almost to a skeleton. At last her taste for finery dis 
appeared, and she refused to change her dresses for a week together.. 
A strange melancholy settled down on her : '' she held in her hand," 
says one who saw her in her last days, " a golden cup, which she often 
put to her lips : but in truth her heart seemed too full to need more 
fining." Gradually her mind gave way. She lost her memory, the 
violence of her temper became unbearable, her very courage seemed 
to forsake her. She called for a sword to he constantly beside her,. 
and thrust it from time to time through the arras, as if she heard 
murderers stirring there. Food and rest became alike distasteful. 
She sate day and night propped up with pillows on a stool, her finger 
on her lip, her eyes fixed on the floor, without a word. If she once 
broke the silence, it was with a flash of her old queenliness. Cecil 
asserted that she " must " go to bed, and the word roused her like a 
trumpet. " Must !" she exclaimed ; "is jnust a word to be addressed to 
princes ? Little man, little man ! thy father, if he had been alive,, 
durst not have used that word." Then, as her anger spent itself, she 
sank into her old dejection. *^ Thou art so presumptuous," she said, 
" because thou knowest I shall die." She rallied once more when the 
ministers beside her bed named Lord Beauchamp, the heir to the 
Sufiblk clairn, as a possible successor. " I will have no rogue's son," 
she cried hoarsely, "in my seat." But she gave no sign, save a 
motion of the head, at the mention of tRe King of Scots. She was 
in fact fast becoming insensible ; and early the next morning the life 
of Ehzabeth, a life so great, so strange and lonely in its greatness^, 
passed quietly away. 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



44; 



CHAPTER VIII. 

PURITAN ENGLAND, 
Section li— Tlie Puritans. 1533—1603. 

[Autkoiities. — For the primary facts of the ecclesiastical histoiy of this time, 
Strype's *' Annals," and his lives of Grindal and Whitgift. Neal's " History 
of the Puritans," besides its inaccuracies, contains little for this period which is 
not taken from the more colourless Strype. For the origin of the Presbyterian 
movement, see the ^'Discourse of the Troubles at Frankfort, 1576," often 
republished; for its later contest with Elizabeth, Mr. Haskell's ** Martin 
Marprelate," which gives copious extracts from the rare pamphlets printed 
under that name. Mr. Hallam's account of the whole struggle ( ' ' Constitutional 
History," caps. iv. and vii.) is admirable for its fulness, lucidity, and imparti- 
ality. Wallingtori's '* Diary" gives us the common life of Puritanism; its 
higher side is shown in Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of her Husband, and in the 
early life of Milton, as told in Mr. Masson's biography.] 



No GREATER moral change ever passed over a nation than passed 
over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign 
of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England 
became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was as 
yet the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman ; it 
was read at churches and read at home, and everywhere its words, as 
they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and 
beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. When Bishop Bonner set up 
the first six Bibles in St. PauFs "many well-disposed people used 
much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get 
any that had an audible voice to read to them. . . . One John Porter 
used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying 
of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and 
of a big stature ; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, 
because he could read v/ell and had an audible voice." The popularity 
of the Bible was owing to other causes besides that of rehgion. The 
whole prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, 
has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndall and 
Coverdale. No history, no romance, no poetry, save the little-known 
verse of Chaucer, existed for any practical purpose in the English tongue 
when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after 
Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round Bonneris 



448 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



f Chap. 



Bibles in the nave of St. PauFs, or the family group that hung on the 
words of the Geneva Bible in the devotional exercises at home, were 
leavened with a new literature. Legends and annals, war song and 
psalm, State-rolls and biographies, the mighty voices of prophets, 
the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by 
the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic 
visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most 
part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek 
literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure 
of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the 
Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its 
effects than the other. No version could transfer to another tongue the 
peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of 
Greece and Rome. Classical letters, therefore, remained in the 
possession of the learned, that is of the few ; and among these, with 
the exception of Colet and More, or of the pedants who revived a 
Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct 
influence was purely intellectual. But the tongue of the Hebrew, the 
idiom of the Hellenic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to 
the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument, the English 
version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue. 
Its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the stan- 
dard of our language. But for the moment its literar}'- effect was less 
than its social. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen 
showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more con- 
spicuously than in the influence it exerted on ordinaiy speech. It 
formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically 
accessible to ordinary Englishmen ; and when we recall the number of 
common phrases which we owe to great authors, the bits of Shakspere, 
or Milton^ or Dickens, or Thackeray, which unconsciously interweave 
themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange 
mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which coloured English talk 
two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illus- 
tration which we borrow from a thousand books, our fathers were 
forced to borrow from one ; and the borrowing was the easier and the 
more natural that the range of the Hebrew literature fitted it for the 
expression of every phase of feeling. When Spenser poured forth 
his warmest love-notes in the " Epithalamion," he adopted the very 
words of the Psalmist, as he bade the gates open for the entrance of 
his bride. When Cromwell saw the mists break over the hills of 
Dunbar, he hailed the sun burst with the cry of David : " Let God 
arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Like as the sun riseth, so 
shalt thou drive them away !" Even to common minds this familiarity 
with grand poetic imagery in prophet and apocalypse gave a loftiness 
and ardour of expression, that with all its tendency to exaggeration and 



.J 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



449 



bombast we may prefer to the slipshod vulgarisms of the shopkeeper 
of to-day. 

But far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase was the 
effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. Elizabeth 
might silence or tune the pulpits ; but it was impossible for her to 
silence or tune the great preachers of justice, and mercy, and truth, 
who spoke from the booi^ which she had again opened for her people. 
Ihe whole moral effect which is produced now-a-days by the rehgious 
newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, the missionary report, the 
sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone. And its effect in this 
way, however dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. 
The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of 
life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious 
impulse spread through every class. Literature reflected the general 
tendency of the time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and 
piety, which still crowd our older libraries, drove before them the 
classical translations and Itahan novelettes of the age of Elizabeth. 
" Theology rules there," said Grotius of England, only ten years after 
the Queen's death ; and when Casaubon, the last of the great scholars 
of the sixteenth century, was invited to England by King James, he 
found both King and people indifferent to letters. " There is a great 
abundance of theologians in England," he says to a friend ; " all point 
their studies in that direction." The study of the country gentleman 
pointed towards theology as much as that of the scholar. As soon as 
Colonel Hutchinson ^'had improved his natural understanding with 
the acquisition of learning, the first studies he exercised himself in 
w^ere the principles of religion." The whole nation became, in fact, a 
Church. The great problems of life and death, whose "obstinate 
questionings" found no answer in the higher minds of Shakspere's 
day, pressed for an answer from the men who followed him. We must 
not, indeed, picture the early Puritan as a gloomy fanatic. It was 
long before the religious movement — which affected the noble and the 
squire as much as the shopkeeper or the farmer — came into conflict 
^ith general culture. With the close of the Elizabethan age, indeed, 
:he intellectual freedom which had marked it faded insensibly away : 
:he bold philosophical speculations which Sydney had caught from 
Bruno, and which had brought on Marlowe and Raleigh the charge of 
itheism, died, like her own religious indifference, with the Queen. 
But the hghter and more elegant sides of the Elizabethan culture 
larmonized well enough with the temper of the Puritan gentleman. 
The figure of Colonel Hutchinson, one of the Regicides, stands out 
Tom his wife's canvas with the grace and tenderness of a portrait 
3y Vandyck. She dwells on the personal beauty which distinguished 
lis youth, on " his teeth even and white as the purest ivory," " his 
lair of brown, very thickset in his youth, softer than the finest silk, 

G G 



Sec. I. 

Thf 

Puritans. 

1583- 

1603. 

Tlie 
Puritans 



\ 



450 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



curling with loose great rings at the ends." Serious as was his tempei 
in graver matters, the young squire was fond of hawking, and pic ed 
himself on his skill in dancing and fence. His artistic taste sho. 
itself in a critical love of " gravings, sculpture, and all liberal arts,'' as 
well as in the pleasure he took in his gardens, " in the improvement 
of his grounds, in planting groves and walks and fruit trees." If he 
was " diligent in his examination of the Scriptures," " he had a grc^*- 
love for music, and often diverted himself with a viol, on which . • 
played masterly." A taste for music, indeed, seems to have been 
common in the graver homes of the time. If we pass from Owthorpe 
and Colonel Hutchinson to the house of a London scrivener in Bread 
Street, we find Milton's father, precisian and man of business as he 
was, composing madrigals to Oriana, and rivalling Bird and Gibbons 
as a writer of sacred song. We miss, indeed, the passion of the 
Elizabethan time, its caprice, its largeness of feeling and sympathy, 
its quick pulse of delight ; but, on the other hand, life gains iiw ; 
moral grandeur, in a sense of the dignity of manhood, in orderliness | 
and equable force. The temper of the Puritan gentleman was*^ 
just, noble, and self-controlled. The larger geniality of the age 
that had passed away shrank into an intense tenderness within the 
narrower circle of the home. " He was as kind a father," says Mrs. 
Hutchinson of her husband, " as dear a brother, as good a master, as 
faithful a friend as the world had." Passion was replaced by a manly 
purity. " Neither in youth nor riper years could the most fair or en- 
ticing woman ever draw him so much as into unnecessary familiarity or 
dalliance. Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure 
and holy and unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to 
excite scandal or temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men 
he abhorred ; and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, 
yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure." The 
play and wilfulness of life, in which the Elizabethans found its chiefest 
charm, the Puritan regarded as unworthy of its character and end. 
His aim was to attain self-command, to be master of himself, of his 
thought and speech and acts. A certain gravity and reflectiveness 
gave its tone to the lightest details of his daily converse with the world 
about him. His temper, quick as it might naturally be, was kept 
under strict control. In his discourse he was ever on his guard against 
talkativeness or frivolity, striving to be deliberate in speech and 
" ranking the words beforehand." His life was orderly and methodical, 
sparing of diet and of self-indulgence ; he rose early, " he never was 
at any time idle, and hated to see any one else so." The new sobriety 
and self-restraint marked itself even in his change of dress. The 
gorgeous colours and jewels of the Renascence disappeared. Colonel 
Hutchmson "left off very early the wearing of anything that was 
costly, yet in his plainest negligent habit appeared very much a 



VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



451 



gentleman." The loss of colour and variety in costume reflected no 
do ibt a certain loss of colour and variety in life itself ; but it was a 
' ,ji -compensated by solid gains. Greatest among these, perhaps, was 
l^^he new conception of social equality. Their common call, their common 
■brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the mind of the Puritans that 
^overpowering sense of social distinctions which characterized the 
;<s^e of EUzabeth. The meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as a 
L;hild of God. The proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality in 
the poorest *^ saint." The great social revolution of the Civil Wars 
and the Protectorate was already felt in the demeanour of gentlemen 
like Hutchinson. " He had a loving and sweet courtesy to the poorest, 
and would often employ many spare hours with the commonest soldiers 
and poorest labourers." " He never disdained the meanest nor flattered 
the greatest." But it was felt even more in the new dignity and self- 
respect with which the consciousness of their '^calling" invested the 
classes beneath the rank of the gentry. Take such a portrait as that 
which John Wallington, a turner in Eastcheap, has left us of a 
London housewife, his mother. " She was very loving," he says, 
" and obedient to her parents, loving and kind to her husband, very 
tender-hearted to her children, loving all that were godly, much mis- 
liking the wicked and profane. She was a pattern of sobriety unto 
many, very seldom was seen abroad except at church ; when others 
recreated themselves at holidays and other times, she would take her 
needle-work and say 'here is my recreation.' . . God had given her 
a pregnant wit and an excellent memory. She was very ripe and 
perfect in all stories of the Bible, likewise in all the stories of the 
Martyrs, and could readily turn to them ; she was also perfect and 
well seen in the English Chronicles, and in the descents of the Kings 
of England. She lived in holy wedlock with her husband twenty years, 
wanting but four days." 

The strength, however, of the Puritan cause lay as yet rather in the 
middle and professional class, than among the small traders or the 
gentry ; and it is in a Puritan of this class that we find the fullest and 
noblest expression of the new influence which was leavening the temper 
of the time. Milton is not only the highest, but the completest type 
of Puritanism. ' His life is absolutely contemporary with that of his 
cause. He was born when it began to exercise a direct power over 
English politics and Enghsh rehgion ; he died when its effort to mould 
them into its own shape was over, and when it had again sunk into 
one of many influences to which we owe our English character. His 
earlier verse, the pamphlets of his riper years, the epics of his age, 
mark with a singular precision the three great stages in its history. 
His youth shows us how much of the gaiety, the poetic ease, the 
intellectual culture of the Renascence lingered in a Puritan home. 
Scrivener and *' precisian " as his father was, he was a skilful musician ; 

G G 2 



452 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and the boy inherited his father's skill on lute and organ. One of the 
finest outbursts in the scheme of education which he put forth at a 
later time is a passage, in which he vindicates the province of music 
as an agent in moral training. His home, his tutor, his school were 
all rigidly Puritan ; but there was nothing narrow or illiberal in his 
early training. " My father," he says, ** destined me while yet a little 
boy to the study of humane letters ; which I seized with such eagerness 
that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my 
lessons to bed before midnight." But to the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew 
he learnt at school, the scrivener advised him to add Italian and 
French. Nor were English letters neglected. Spenser gave the 
earliest turn to his poetic genius. In spite of the war between play- 
wright and precisian, a Puritan youth could still in Milton's days avow 
his love of the stage, " if Jonson's learned sock be on, or sweetest 
Shakspere, Fancy's child, warble his native woodnotes wild," and 
gather from the "masques and antique pageantry" of the court -revel 
hints for his own Comus and Arcades. Nor does any shadow oi ^ 
the coming struggle with the Church disturb the young scholar'Jli 
reverie, as he wanders beneath "the high embowed roof, with^^ 
antique pillars, massy proof, and storied windows richly dight, casting 
a dim religious light," or as he hears " the pealing organ blow to the 
full-voiced choir below, in service high and anthem clear." His enjoy- 
ment of the gaiety of life stands in bright contrast with the gloom and 
sternness of the later Puritanism. In spite of " a certain reservedness 
of natural disposition," which shrank from " festivities and jests, in 
which I acknowledge my faculty to be very slight," the young singer 
could still enjoy the "jest and youthful jollity" of the world around 
him, of its " quips and cranks and wanton wiles ; " he could join the 
crew of Mirth, and look pleasantly on at the village fair, " where the 
jolly rebecks sound to many a youth and many a maid, dancing in the 
chequered shade." But his pleasures were unreproved. There was 
nothing ascetic in his look, in his slender, vigorous frame, his face full 
of a delicate yet serious beauty, the rich brown hair which clustered over 
his brow ; and the words we have quoted show his sensitive enjoyment 
of all that was beautiful. But from coarse or sensual self-indulgence 
the young Puritan turned with disgust : " A certain reservedness of 
nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem, kept me still above 
those low descents of mind." He drank in an ideal chivalry from 
Spenser, but his religion and purity disdained the outer pledge on 
which chivalr>' built up its fabric of honour. " Every free and gentle 
spirit," said Milton, " without that oath, ought to be born a knight." 
It was with this temper that he passed from his London school, St 
Paul's, to Christ's College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that 
he preserved throughout his University career. He left Cambridge, 
as he said afterwards, " free from all reproach, and approved by all 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



453 



honest men," with a purpose of self-dedication " to that same lot, 
however mean or high, towards which* time leads me, and the will of 
Heaven." 

Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this, we catch the 
sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of its aim, the 
intensity of its moral concentration, brought with them a loss of the 
genial delight in all that was human which distinguished the men of 
the Renascence. " If ever God instilled an intense love of moral 
beauty into the mind of any man," said Milton, " he has instilled it 
into mine." *' Love Virtue," closed his Comus, " she alone is free ! " 
But the love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it gave strength to 
human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human intelli- 
gence. Already in Milton we note *^ a certain reservedness of temper," 
a contempt for " the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud retire- 
ment from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as 
was his love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in 
Falstaff. In minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended 
in a hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinaiy Puritan, like the 
housewife of Eastcheap whom we have noticed above, " loved all 
that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond 
to other men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the re- 
cognition of a brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the 
saints lay a world which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy 
of their God. It was this utter isolation from the '* ungodly" that 
explains the contrast which startles us between the inner tenderness of 
the Puritans and the ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Crom- 
well, whose son's death (in his own words) went to his heart " like a 
dagger, indeed it did ! " and who rode away sad and wearied from the 
triumph of Marston Moor, burst into horse-play as he signed the death- 
warrant of the King. A temper which had thus lost sympathy with 
the life of half the world around it could hardly sympathise with the 
whole of its own life. Humour, the faculty which above all corrects 
exaggeration and extravagance, died away before the new stress and 
i strain of existence. The absolute devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme 
Will tended more and more to rob him of all sense of measure and 
proportion in common matters. Little things became great things in the 
glare of religious zeal ; and the godly man learnt to shrink from a sur- 
plice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he shrank from impurity or a lie. 
Life_became hard, rigid, colourless, as it became intense. The play, 
the geniality, the dehght of the Elizabethan age were exchanged for 
a measured sobriety, seriousness, and self-restraint. But it was a. self- 
restraint and sobriety which hmited itself wholly to the outer life. In 
the inner soul of the Puritan, sense, reason, judgment were overborne 
by the terrible reality of *' invisible things." Our first glimpse of 
Oliver Cromwell is as a voung country squire and farmer in the marsh 



Sec. I. 

The 

Puritans. 

1583- 

1603. 

CroxnweU 

and 
Bunyan. 



454 , V 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to time in 
a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. " I live 
in Meshac," he writes to a friend, " which they say signifies Prolonging ; 
in Kedar, which signifies Darkness ; yet the Lord forsaketh me not.** 
The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the life of 
common mxCn seem sin. " You know what my manner of life has 
been," Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and 
hated light. I hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably 
nothing more than an enjo3anent of the natural buoyancy of youth, 
and a want of the deeper earnestness which comes with riper years. 
In imaginative tempers, like that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more 
picturesque form. John Bunyan was the son of a poor tinker at 
Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in childhood his fancy revelled in 
terrible visions of Heaven and Hell. " When I was but a child of 
nine or ten years old," he tells us, ^* these things did so distress my 
soul, that then in the midst of my merry sports and childish vanities, 
amidst my vain companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted 
in my mind therewith ; yet could I not let go my sins." The sins he 
could not let go were a love of hockey and of dancing on the village 
green ; for the only real fault which his bitter self-accusation dis- 
closes, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end to at once and for 
ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for bell-ringing 
clung to him even after he had broken from it as a " vain practice ; '' 
and he would go to the steeple house and look on, till the thought that 
a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him panic-stricken 
from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew him for 
a time from these indulgences ; but the temptation again overmastered 
his resolve, " I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my old 
custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But 
the same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having 
struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the 
second time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, 
which said, ' Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy 
sins and go to Hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze ; 
wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to heaven ; 
and was as if I had with the eyes of my understanding seen the Lord 
Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, 
and as if He did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment 
for those and other ungodly practices." 

Such was Puritanism, and it is of the highest importance to realize 
it thus in itself, in its greatness and its litdeness, apart from the 
ecclesiastical system of Presbyterianism with which it is so often 
confounded. As we shall see in the course of our story, not one of 
the leading Puritans of the Long Parliament was a Presbyterian. 
Pym and Hampden had no sort of objection to Episcopacy, and 



VIIL] 



PVRITAN ENGLAND, 



455 



the adoption of the Presbyterian system was only forced on thej 
Puritan patriots in their later struggle by political considerations. | 
But the growth of the movement, which thus influenced our history | 
for a^ime, forms one of the most curious episodes in Elizabeth's 
reignT^K^er Church policy rested on the Acts of Supremacy and of 
Uniformity ; the first of which placed all ecclesiastical jurisdiction and 
legislative power in the hands of the State, while the second prescribed 
a course of doctrine and discipline, from which no variation was 
legally permissible. For the nation at large, the system which was 
thus adopted was no doubt a wise and a healthy one. Single-handed, 
and unsupported by any of the statesmen or divines of their time, the 
Queen and the Primate forced on the warring religions a sort of armed 
truce. The main principles of the Reformation were accepted, but 
the zeal of the ultra- re formers was held at bay. The Bible was left 
open, private discussion was unrestrained, but the warfare of pulpit 
against pulpit was silenced by the licensing of preachers. An outer 
conformity, and attendance at public worship, was exacted from all ; but 
the changes in ritual, by which the zealots of Geneva gave prominence 
to the radical features of the religious change which was passing over 
the country, were steadily resisted. While England was struggling for 
existence, this balanced attitude of the Crown reflected faithfully 
enough the balanced attitude of the nation; but with the death of Mar>' 
Stuart the danger was over, and a marked change in public sentiment 
became at once observable. Unhappily no corresponding change 
took place m the Queen. With the religious enthusiasm which was 
growing up around her she had no sympathy whatever. Her passion 
was for moderation, her aim was simply civil order ; and both 
order and moderation were threatened, as she held, by the knot of 
clerical bigots who gathered from this hour under the banner of 
Presbyterianism. Of these Thomas Cartwright was the chief. He 
had studied at Geneva ; he returned with a fanatical faith in Cal- 
vinism, and in the system of Church government which Calvin had 
devised ; and as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge he used 
to the full the opportunities which his chair gave him of propagating 
his opinions. No leader of a religious party ever deserved less of 
after sympathy than Cartwright. He was unquestionably learned and 
devout, but his bigotry was that of a mediaeval inquisitor. The relics 
of the old ritual, the cross in baptism, the surplice, the giving of a^ 
ring in marriage, were to him not merely distasteful, as they were to 
the Puritans at large, they were idolatrous and the mark of the beast. 
His declamations against ceremonies and superstition however had 
httle weight with Elizabeth or her Primates ; what scared them was 
his reckless advocacy of a scheme of ecclesiastical government which 
placed the State beneath the feet of the Church. The absolute rule of 
bishops, indeed, he denounced as begotten of the devil ; but the 



Sec I. 

The 

Puritans. 

1583- 

1603. 



456 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 

The 

Puritans. 

1583- 

1603. 



absolute rule of Presbyters he held to be established by the word Oi 
God. For the Church modelled after the fashion of Geneva he 
claimed an authority which surpassed the wildest dreams of the 
masters of the Vatican. All spiritual power and jurisdiction, the de- 
creeing of doctrine, the ordering of ceremonies, lay wholly, accord- 
ing to his Calvinistic creed, in the hands of the ministers of the 
Church. To them, too, belonged the supervision of public morals. 
In an ordered arrangement of classes and synods, they were to govern 
their flocks, to regulate their own order, to decide in matters of faith, 
to administer "discipline." Their weapon was excommunication, and 
they were responsible for its use to none but Christ. The province oi 
the civil ruler was simply " to see their decrees executed and to punish 
the contemners of them," for the spirit of such a system as this 
naturally excluded all toleration of practice or belief. With the 
despotism of a Hildebrand, Cartwright combined the cruelty of a 
Torquemada. Not only was Presbyterianism to be established as the 
one legal form of Church government, but all other forms, Episcopalian 
and Separatist, were to be ruthlessly put down. For heresy there was 
the punishment of death. Never had the doctrine of persecution 
been urged with such a blind and reckless ferocity. " I deny,'' wrote 
Cartwright, " that upon repentance there ought to follow any pardon 
of death. . . . Heretics ought to be put to death now. If this be 
bloody and extreme, I am content to be so counted with the Holy 
Ghost.'^ 

Opinions such as these might wisely have been left to be refuted by 
the good sense of the people itself. They found, in fact, a crushing 
answer in the " Ecclesiastical Polity " of Richard Hooker, a clergyman 
who had been Master of the Temple, but whose distaste for the 
controversies of its pulpit drove him from London to a Wiltshire 
vicarage at Boscombe, which he exchanged at a later time for the 
parsonage of Bishopsbourne, among the quiet meadows of Kent. 
The largeness of temper which characterized all the nobler minds of 
his day, the philosophic breadth which is seen as clearly in Shakspere 
as in Bacon, was united in Hooker with a grandeur and stateliness of 
style, which raised him to the highest rank among English prose 
writers. Divine as he was, his spirit and method were philosophical 
rather than theological. Against the ecclesiastical dogmatism of 
\ Cartwi'ight he set the authority of reason. He abandoned the narrow 
• ground of Scriptural argument to base his conclusions on the general 
I principles of moral and political science, on the eternal obligations of 
' natural law. The Presbyterian system rested on the assumption that 
! an immutable rule for human action, in all matters relating to religion, 
j to worship, and to the discipline and constitution of the Church, was 
'.laid down, and only laid down, in Scripture. Hooker urged that a 
i Divine order exists, not in written revelation only, but in the moral 



I' 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



457 



relations, and the social and political institutions of men. He claimed | 
for human reason the province of determining the laws of this order ; of 
distinguishing between what is changeable and unchangeable in them, 
between what is eternal and what is temporary in Scripture itself. It 
was easy for him to push on to the field of theological controversy 
which Cartwright had chosen, to show historically that no form of 
Church government had ever been of indispensable obligation, and that 
ritual observances had in all ages been left to the discretion of Churches, 
and determined by the differences of times. But the truth on which he 
rested his argument against the dogmatism of the Presbyterian is of far 
higher value than his argument itself ; for it is the truth against which 
ecclesiastical dogmatism, whether of the Presbyterian or the Catholic, 
must always shatter itself. The " Ecclesiastical PoHty " appealed 
rather to the broad sense and intelligence of Englishmen than to 
the learning of divines, but its appeal was hardly needed. Popular 
as the Presbyterian system became in Scotland, it never took any popu- 
lar hold on England ; it remained to the last a clerical rather than a 
national creed, and even in the moment of its seeming triumph under 
the Commonwealth it was rejected by every part of England save 
London and Lancashire. But the bold challenge to the Government 
which was delivered in Cartwright's " Admonition to the Parliament " 
had raised a panic among English statesmen and prelates which cut 
off all hopes of a quiet appeal to reason. It is probable that, but 
for the storm which Cartwright raised, the steady growth of general 
discontent with the ritualistic usages he denounced would have 
brought about their abolition. The Parliament of 1571 not only 
refused to bind the clergy to subscription to three articles on the 
Supremacy, the form of Church government, and the power of the 
Church to ordain rites and ceremonies, but favoured the project of 
reforming the Liturgy by the omission of the superstitious practices. 
But with the appearance of the " Admonition " this natural progress 
of opinion abruptly ceased. The moderate statesmen who had pressed 
for a change in ritual withdrew from union with a party which 
revived the worst pretensions of the Papacy. Parker^s hand pressed 
heavier than before on nonconforming ministers, while Elizabeth was 
provoked to a measure which forms the worst blot on her reign. 

Her establishment of the Ecclesiastical Commission in fact converted 
the religious truce into a spiritual despotism. From being a temporary 
board which represented the Royal Supremacy in matters ecclesiastical, 
the Commission was now turned into a permanent body wielding the 
almost unlimited powers of the Crown. All opinions or acts contrary to 
the Statutes of Supremacy and Uniformity fell within its cognizance. 
A right of deprivation placed the clergy at its mercy. It had power to 
alter or amend the Statutes of Colleges or Schools. Not only heresy, 
and schism, and nonconformity, but incest or aggravated adultery were 



Sec. 1 



458 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



held to fall within its scope : its means of enquiry were left without 
limit, and it might fine or imprison at its will. By the mere establish- 
ment of such a Court half the work of the Reformation was undone ; 
butth,e large number of civilians on the board seemed to furnish some 
security against the excess of ecclesiastical tyranny. Of its forty-four 
commissioners however few actually took any part in its proceedings ; 
and the powers of the Commission were practically left in the hands 
of the successive Prim.ates. No Archbishop of Canterbury since the 
days of Augustine had wielded an authority so vast, so utterly despotic, 
as that of Parker and Whitgift and Bancroft and Abbot and Laud. 
The most terrible feature of their spiritual tyranny was its wholly 
personal character. The old symbols of doctrine were gone, and the 
lawyers had not yet stept in to protect the clergy oy defining the exact 
limits of the new. The result was that at the Commission-board at 
Lambeth the Primates created their own tests of doctrine with an utter 
indifference to those created bylaw. In one instance Parker deprived 
a vicar of his benefice for a denial of the verbal inspiration of the 
Bible. Nor did the successive Archbishops care greatly if the test 
was a varying or a conflicting one. Whitgift strove to force on the 
Church the Calvinistic supralapsarianism of his Lambeth Articles. 
Bancroft, who followed him, was as earnest in enforcing his anti- 
Calvinistic dogma of the Divine right of the episcopate. Abbot had 
no mercy for Erastians. Laud had none for anti-Erastians. It is no 
wonder that the Ecclesiastical Commission, which these men repre- 
sented, soon stank in the nostrils of the English clergy. Its establish- 
ment however marked the adoption of a distinct policy on the part 
of the Crown, and its efforts were backed by stern measures of re- 
pression. All preaching or reading in private houses was forbidden ; 
and in spite of the refusal of Parliament to enforce the requirement 
of them by law, subscription to the Three Articles was exacted from 
every member of the clergy. 

For the moment these measures were crowned with success. The 
movement under Cartwright was checked ; Cartwright himself was 
driven from his Professorship ; and an outer uniformity of worship was 
more and more brought about by the steady pressure of the Commission. 
The old liberty which had been allowed in London and the other Protes- 
tant parts of the kingdom was no longer permitted to exist. The lead- 
ing Puritan clergy, whose nonconformity had hitherto been winked at, 
were called upon to submit to the surplice, and to make the sign of 
the cross. The remonstrances of the country gentry availed as littlf 
as the protest of Lord Burleigh himself to protect two hundred or 
the best ministers, who were driven from their parsonages on their 
refusal to subscribe to the Three Articles. But the result of this 
persecution was simply to give a fresh life and popularity to the 
doctrines v/hich it aimed at crushing, by drawing together two currents 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



459 



of opinion which were in themselves perfectly distinct. The Presby- 
terian platform of Church discipline had as yet been embraced by the 
clergy only, and by few among the clergy. On the other hand, the wish 
for a reform in the Liturgy, the dislike of " superstitious usages," of 
the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism, the gift of the 
ring in marriage, the posture of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, was 
shared by a large number of the clergy and laity alike. At the open- 
ing of Elizabeth's reign almost all the higher Churchmen but Parker 
were opposed to them, and a motion for their abolition in Convo- 
cation was lost but by a single vote. The temper of the countiy 
gentlemen on this subject was indicated by that of Parliament ; and 
it was well known that the wisest of the Queen's Councillors, Burleigh, 
Walsingham, and Knollys, were at one in this matter with the gentry. 
If their common persecution did not wholly succeed in fusing these tv/o 
sections of religious opinion into one, it at any rate gained for the 
Presbyterians a general sympathy on the part of the Puritans, which 
raised them from a clerical clique into a popular party. Nor were the 
consequences of the persecution limited to the strengthening of the 
Presbyterians. The " Separatists," who were beginning to withdraw 
from attendance at public worship, on the ground that the very 
existence of a national Church was contrary to the Word of God, 
grew quickly from a few scattered zealots to twenty thousand souls. 
Congregations of these Independents — or, as they were called at this 
time, from the name of their founder, Brov/nists — formed rapidly 
throughout England ; and persecution on the part of the Bishops and 
the Presbyterians, to both of whom their opinions were equally hateful, 
drove flocks of refugees over sea. go great a future awaited one of 
these congregations that we may pause to get a glimpse of "a poor 
people" in Lincolnshire and the neighbourhood, who ^' being enlight- 
ened by the Word of God," and their members " urged with the yoke 
of subscription," had been led "to see further." They rejected cere- 
monies as relics of idolatry, the rule of bishops as unscriptural, and 
joined themselves, "as the Lord's free people," into "a church estate 
on the fellowship of the Gospel." Choosing John Robinson as their 
minister, they felt their way forward to the great principle of liberty 
of conscience ; and asserted their Christian right " to walk in all the 
ways which God had made known or should make known to them." 
Their meetings or " conventicles " soon drew down the heavy hand 
of the law, and the little company resolved to seek a refuge in other 
lands ; but their first attempt at flight was prevented, and when they 
made another, their wives and children were seized at the very moment 
of entering the ship. At last, however, the magistrates gave a con- 
temptuous assent to their project ; they were in fact " glad to be rid 
of them at any price ; " and the fugitives found shelter at Amsterdam. 
^^ They knew they were pilgrims and looked not much on these things, 



460 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



Chap/ 



but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, and quieted 
their spirits/' Among this httle band of exiles were those who were 
to become famous at a later time as the Pilgrim Fathers of the 
Mayflower, 

It was easy to be " rid " of the Brownists ; but the political danger 
of the course on which the Crown had entered was seen in the rise of 
a spirit of vigorous opposition, such as had not made its appearance 
since the accession of the Tudors. The growing power of public 
opinion received a striking recognition in the struggle which bears the 
name of the " Martin Marprelate controversy." The Puritans had 
from the first appealed by their pamphlets from the Crown to the 
people, and VVhitgift bore witness to their influence on opinion 
by his efforts to gag the Press. The regulations of the Star-Chamber 
for this purpose are memorable as the first step in the long struggle 
of government after government to check the liberty of printing. 
The irregular censorship which had long existed was now finally 
organized. Printing was restricted to London and the two Universi- 
ties, the number of printers reduced, and all candidates for licensa 
to print placed under the supervision of the Company of Stationers. 
Every publication too, great or small, had to receive the approbation 
of the Primate or the Bishop of London. The first result of 
this system of repression was the appearance, in the very year of 
the Armada, of a series of anonymous pamphlets bearing the signifi- 
cant name of " Martin Marprelate," and issued from a secret press, 
which found refuge from the Royal pursuivants in the country-houses 
of the gentry. The press was at last seized ; and the suspected 
authors of these scurrilous libels, Penry, a young Welshman, and a 
minister named Udall, died, the one in prison, the other on the scaffold. 
But the virulence and boldness of their language produced a power- 
ful effect, for it was impossible under the system of Elizabeth to 
" mar " the bishops without attacking the Crown ; and a new age of 
political liberty was felt to be at hand when Martin Marprelate forced 
the political and ecclesiastical measures of the Government into 
the arena of public discussion. The suppression, indeed, of these 
pamphlets was far from damping the courage of the Presbyterians. 
Cartwright, who had been appointed by Lord Leicester to the master- 
ship of an hospital at Warwick, was bold enough to organize his 
system of Church discipline among the clergy of that county and of 
Northamptonshire. The example was widely followed ; and the general 
gatherings of the whole ministerial body of the clergy, and the 
smaller assemblies for each diocese or shire, which in the Presby- 
terian scheme bore the name of Synods and Classes, began to be held 
j in many parts of England for the purposes of debate and consultation. 
The new organization was quickly suppressed indeed, but Cartwright 
I was saved from the banishment which Whitgift demanded by a promise 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



461 



of submission ; and the struggle, transferred to the higher sphere of 
the Parliament, widened into the great contest for liberty under James, 
and the Civil War under his successor. 



Section II.— Tlie First of the Stuarts. 1604— 1623. 

{^Authorities. — Mr. Gardiner's ** History of England from the Accession of 
Tames I.," continued in his *' History of the Spanish Marriages," is invaluable 
for its fullness and good sense, as well as for the amount of fresh information col- i 
lected in it. Camden's "Annals of James I.," with the King's own works, are , 
useful as contemporary authorities. Win wood's " Memorials of State " contain ' 
the more important documents. Hacket's **Life of Williams" and Harring- 1 
ton's '^NugDe Antiquae" give us valuable side-light for the general politics of, 
the time. For the last two Parliaments, see *' Debates and Proceedings of the I 
Plouse of Commons," Oxford, 1766. Mr. Spedding's ** Life and Letters of 
Lord Bacon," as well as his edition of his Works, are indispensable for a know- 
ledge of the period.] 



Sec II. 

The 
First op 

THE 

Stuarts. 
1604. 
1623. 



To judge fairly the attitude and policy of the English Puritans, that 
is of three-fourths of the Protestants of England, at this moment, we 
must cursorily review the fortunes of Protestantism during the reign 
of Elizabeth. At the Queen's accession, the success of the Reforma- 
tion seemed almost ever^^where secure. Already triumphant in the 
north of Germany, the Pacification of Passau was the signal for a be- 
ginning of its conquest of the south. The Emperor Maximilian was 
believed to be wavering in the faith. Throughout Austria and Hun- 
gary, the nobles and burghers abandoned Cathohcism in a mass. A 
Venetian ambassador estimated the German Catholics at little more 
than one-tenth of the whole population of Germany. The Scandi- 
navian kingdoms embraced the new faith, and it mastered at once the 
eastern and western States of Europe. In Poland the majority of the 
nobles became Protestants. Scotland flung off Catholicism under Mary, 
and England veered round again to Protestantism under Elizabeth. 
At the same moment, the death of Henry the Second opened a way for 
the rapid diffusion of the new doctrines in France. Only where the 
dead hand of Spain lay heaw, in Castile, in Arragon, or in Italy, was 
the Reformation thoroughly crushed out ; and even the dead hand of 
Spain failed to crush heresy in the Low Countries. But at the very 
instant of its seeming triumph, the advance of the new religion was 
suddenly arrested. The first twenty years of Elizabeth's reign were 
a period of suspense. The progress of Protestantism gradually 
ceased. It wasted its strength in theological controversies and per- 
secutions, above all in the bitter and venomous discussions between 
the Churches which followed Luther and the Churches which followed 
Calvin. It was degraded and weakened by the prostitution of the 
Reformation to pohtical ends, by the greed and worthlessness of the 



Tte 
Catholic 
Reaction 



462 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



German princes who espoused its cause, by the factious lavvlcs-ness. 
of the nobles in Poland, and of the Huguenots in France. Mean- 
while the Papacy succeeded in rallying the Catholic world round jthe 
Council of Trent. The Roman Church, enfeebled and corrupted by th^^ 
triumph of ages, felt at last the uses of adversity. Her faith v^if' 
settled and defined. The most crying among the ecclesiastical ii diitv 
which had provoked the movement of the Reformation weref (■eiri.)' ] oi 
down. The enthusiasm of the Protestants roused a counter enttiusia-j.cr.. 
among their opponents ; new religious orders rose to meet the warns, 
of the day ; the Capuchins became the preachers of C 
the Jesuits became not only its preachers, but its direct, 
schoolmasters, its missionaries, its diplomatists. Their organization, 
their blind obedience, their real abihty, their fanatical zeal galvanized 
the pulpit, the school, the confessional into a new Hfe. If the Pro- 
testants had enjoyed the profitable monopoly of martyrdom at the 
opening of the century, the Catholics won a fair share of it as soon 
as the disciples of Loyola came to the front. The tracts which 
pictured the tortures of Campion and Southwell roused much the 
same fire at Toledo or Vienna as the pages of Foxe had roused in 
England. Even learning passed gradually over to the side of the 
older faith. Bellarmine, the greatest of controversiahsts at this 
time, Baronius, the most erudite of Church historians, were both 
Catholics. With a growing inequality of strength such as this, we can 
hardly wonder that the tide was seen at last to turn. A few years, 
before the fight with the Armada Catholicism began definitely to win 
ground. Southern Germany, where the Austrian House, so long luke- 
warm in its faith, had at last become zealots in its defence, was the first 
country to be re-Catholicised. The success of Socinianism in Poland 
severed that kingdom from any real communion with the general body 
of the Protestant Churches ; and these again were more and more 
divided into two warring camps by the controversies about the Sacra- 
ment and Free Will. Everywhere the Jesuits won converts, and their 
peaceful victories were soon backed by the arm of Spain. In the 
fierce struggle which followed, Philip was undoubtedly worsted. 
England was saved by its defeat of the Armada ; the United Provinces 
of the Netherlands rose into a great Protestant power through their 
own dogged heroism and the genius of William the Silent. France 
was rescued, at the moment when all hope seemed gone, by the un- 
conquerable energy of Henry of Navarre. But even in its defeat 
Catholicism gained ground. In the Low Countries, the Reformation 
was driven from the Walloon provinces, from Brabant, and from 
Flanders. In France, Henry the Fourth found himself obliged to 
purchase Paris by a mass ; and the conversion of the King was 
followed by a quiet dissolution of the Huguenot party. Nobles and 
scholars alike forsook Protestantism ; and though the Reformation 



II 



III.] 



PURITAN' ENGLAND. 



463 



remained dominant south of the Loire, it lost all hope of winning vhe 
country as a whole to its side. 

At the death of Elizabeth, therefore, the temper of every Protestant, 
hether in England or abroad, was that of a man who, after cherishing 
e hope of a crowning victory, is forced to look on at a crushing and 
^ emediable defeat. The dream of a reformation of the universal 
urch was utterly at an end. The borders of Protestantism were 
r.ctrrowing every day, nor was there a sign that the triumph of the 
Papacy was arrested. The accession of James indeed raised the 
liO),es of the Catholics in England itself; he had intrigued for their 
sr .port before the Queen's death, and their persecution was relaxed for 
a while after he had mounted the throne. But it soon began again 
with even greater severity than of old, and six thousand Catholics were 
presented as recusants in a single year. Hopeless of aid from abroad, 
or of success in an open rising at home, a small knot of desperate men, 
with Robert Catesby, who had been engaged in the plot of Essex, at 
their head, resolved to destroy at a blow both King and Parliament. 
Barrels of powder were placed in a cellar beneath the Parliament 
House ; and while waiting for the fifth of November, when the Parlia- 
ment was summoned to meet, the plans of the little group widened into 
a formidable conspiracy. Catholics of greater fortune, such as Sir 
Edward Digby and Francis Tresham, were admitted to their confidence, 
and supplied money for the larger projects they designed. Arms were 
bought in Flanders, horses were held in readiness, a meeting of 
Catholic gentlemen was brought about under show of a hunting party 
to serve as the beginning of a rising. The destruction of the King 
was to be followed by the seizure of the King's children and an open 
revolt, in which aid might be called for from the Spaniards in Flanders. 
Wonderful as was the secrecy with which the plot was concealed, the 
cowardice of Tresham at the last moment gave a clue to it by a letter to 
Lord Monteagle, his relative, which warned him to absent himself from 
the Parliament on the fatal day ; and further information brought about 
the discovery of the cellar and of Guido Fawkes, a soldier of fortune, 
who was charged with the custody of it. The hunting party broke up 
in despair, t*he conspirators were chased from county to county, 
and either killed or sent to the block, and Garnet, the Provincial of the 
English Jesuits, was brought to solemn trial. He had shrunk from all 
part in the plot, but its existence had been made known to him by 
another Jesuit, Greenway, and horror-stricken as he represented himself' 
to have been he had kept the secret and left the Parliament to its 
doom. We can hardly wonder that a frenzy of horror and dread filled 
the minds of English Protestants at such a discovery. What inten- 
sified the dread was a sense of defection and uncertainty within the 
pale of the Church of England itself. No men could be more opposed 
in their tendencies to one another than the High Churchmen, such 



Sec. II. 

The 

First of 

THE 

Stuarts. 

1623. 

The GtiQ- 

pcwder 

Plot. 



464 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Tlie 

Divine 

Ri^ht 

of Kiu^s. 



as Laud, and the English Latitudinarian, such as Hales. But to the 
ordinary English Protestant both Latitudinarian and High Churcn- 
men were equally hateful. To him the struggle with the Papac 
was not one for compromise or comprehension. It was a struggle 
between light and darkness, between life and death. Every Pro- 
testant doctrine, from the least to the greatest, was equally truf? 
and equally sacred. No innovation in faith or worship was ^ 
small account, if it tended in the direction of Rome. Ceremonies, 
which in an hour of triumph might have been allowed as solaces 
to weak brethren, became insufferable when they were turned b> 
weak brethren into a means of drawing nearer to the enemy in the 
hour of defeat. The peril was too close at hand to allow of compro- 
mises. Now that falsehood was gaining ground, the only security for 
truth was to draw a hard and fast line between truth and falsehood. 
It is a temper such as this that we trace in the Millenary Petition 
(as it was called), which was presented to James the First on his 
accession by nearly eight hundred clergymen, a tenth of the whole 
number in his realm. Its tone was not Presbyterian, but strictly 
Puritan. It asked for no change in the government or organization 
of the Church, but for a reform in the Church courts, the provision 
and training of godly ministers, and the suppression of " Popish 
usages '^ in the Book of Common Prayer. Even those who were most 
opposed to the Presbyterian scheme agreed as to the necessity of 
some concession on points of this sort. " Why," asked Bacon, "should 
the civil state be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws 
made every three years in Parliament assembled, devising remedies as 
fast as time breedeth mischief; and contrariwise the ecclesiastical 
state still continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alteration 
these forty-five years or more." A general expectation, in fact, pre- 
vailed that, now the Queen's opposition was removed, something would 
be done. But, different as his theological temper was from the purely 
secular temper of Elizabeth, her successor was equally resolute against 
all changes in Church matters. 

No sovereign could have jarred against the conception of an Englis' 
ruler which had grown up under the Tudors more utterly than Jamt 
the First. His big head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, hi 
rickety legs, his goggle eyes, stood out in as grotesque a contrast . 
all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as his gabble and roc 
montade, his want of personal dignity, his coarse buffoonery, 1 
drunkenness, his pedantry, his contemptible cowardice. Under th 
ridiculous exterior however lay a man of much natural ability, a rip 
scholar, with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of mother wit, and 
ready repartee. His canny humour lights up the political and theological 
controversies of the time with quaint incisive phrases, with puns and 
epigrams and touches of irony, which still retain their savour. Hi<^ 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



4G5 



ip^ading, especially in theological matters, was extensive ; and he was a 
voluminous author on subjects which ranged from Predestinarianism to 

obacco. But his shrewdness and learning only left him, in the phrase 
of Henry the Fourth, " the wisest fool in Christendom/' He had the 
temper of a pedant ; and with it a pedant's love of theories, and a 
pedant's inability to bring his theories into any relation with actual 
facts. All might have gone well had he confined himself to speculations 
about witchcraft, about predestination, about the noxiousness of smoking. 
Unhappily tor England and for his successor, he clung yet more 
passionately to two theories which contained within them the seeds 
of a death-struggle between his people and the Crown. The first was 
that of a Dpa^e-^ight'-^-Kings. Even before his accession to the 
EngHsh throne, he had formulated the theory of an absolute royalty in 
his work on '* The True Law of Free Monarchy ;" and announced that, 
" although a good King will frame his actions to be according to law, 
yet he is not bound thereto, but of his own will and for example-giving 
to his subjects." The notion was a wholly new one ; and like most of 
James's notions was founded simply on a blunder, or at the best on a 
play upon words. " An absolute King," or " an absolute monarchy, " 
meant, with the Tudor statesmen who used the phrase, a sovereign or 
rule complete in themselves, and independent of all foreign or Papal 
interference. James chose to regard the words as implying the 
monarch's freedom from all control by law, or from responsibility to 
anything but his own royal will. The King's blunder however became 
a system of government, a doctrine which bishops preached from 
the pulpit, and for which brave men laid their heads on the block. 
The Church was quick to adopt its sovereign's discovery. Convocation 
in its book of Canons denounced as a fatal error the assertion that 
'^ all civil power, jurisdiction, and authority were first derived from the 
people and disordered multitude, or either is originally still in them, 
or else is deduced by their consent naturally from them, and is not 
God's ordinance originally descending from Him and depending upon 
Him." In strict accordance with James's theory, these doctors declared 
sovereignty in its origin to be the prerogative of birthright, and 
.nculcated passive obedience to the monarch as a religious obligation, 
.^owell, a civilian, followed up the discoveries of Convocation by an 
•^^--aouncement that *' the King is above the law by his absolute power," 
(-^jHid that "notwithstanding his oath he may alter and suspend any 

particular law that seemeth hurtful to the public estate." The book 
^as suppressed on the remonstrance of the House of Commons, but 
,^he party of passive obedience grew fast. A few years before the 

King's death, the University of Oxford decreed solemnly that " it was 
in no case lawful for subjects to make use of force against their princes, 
or to appear offensively or defensively in the field against them." 
The King's " arrogant speeches," if they roused resentment in the 

H H 



466 



JIISTORV OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



Parliaments to which they were addressed, created by sheer force of 
repetition a certain behef in the arbitrary right they challenged f: .; ^* 
Crown. We may give one instance of their tone from a spoec \ 
delivered in the Star-Chamber. " i\s it is atheism and blasphern) t) 
dispute what God can do," said James, " so it is presumption and a 
higli contempt in a subject to dispute what a King can do, or to si^ 
that a King cannot do this or that." A few years after his accession 
his words had startled English ears with a sense of coming danger to 
the national liberty. *^ If the practice should follow the positions '- was 
the comment of a thoughtful observer, " we are not likely to : 
our successors that freedom we received from our forefathers. 

It is necessary to weigh, throughout the course of James's reii:^T. , r];is 
aggressive attitude of the Crown, if we would rightly judge whai sv::;m? 
at first sight to be an aggressive tone in some of the proceedings of the 
Parliaments. With new claims of power such as these befor- r 

to have stood still v/ould have been ruin. The claim, too, \i 
which jarred against all that was noblest in the Puritan tone 
time. The temper of the Puritan was eminently a temper 
The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures sprang fr^ ■!> i'a.i 
earnestness to discover a Divine Will which in all things, great o' 
small, he might implicitly obey. But this implicit obedienre ^ . -, 
reserved for the Divine Will alone; for human ordinances derived inc.: 
strength only from their correspondence with the revealed law of God. 
7"he Puritan was bound by his very religion to examine everv r.lajm 
made on his civil and spiritual obedience by the powers that b 
to own or reject the claim, as it accorded with the higher duty 
he owed to God. ^' In matters of faith," Mrs. Hutchinson tell; , 
her husband, '^his reason always submitted to the Word ot VjOq ; 
but in all other things the greatest names in the world would not 
lead him without reason." It was plain that an impassable gulf 
parted such a temper as this from the temper of unquestioning devo- 
tion to the Crown which James demanded. It was a temper not only 
legal, but even pedantic in its legality, intolerant from its very sense of 
a moral order and law of the lawlessness and disorder of a personal 
tyranny ; a temper of criticism, of judgment, and, if need be, of stubborn 
and unconquerable resistance ; of a resistance which sprang, not fron> 
the disdain of authority, but from the Puritan's devotion to an 
authority higher than that of Kings. But if the theory of a Divine 
right of Kings was certain to rouse against it all the nobler ener^^^s 
of Puritanism, there was something which roused its nobler and its 
pettier instincts of resistance, alike in James's second theory of a 
Divine right of Bishops. Ehzabeth^s conception of her Ecclesiastical 
Supremacy had been a sore stumbling-block to her subjects, but Eliza- 
beth at least regarded the Supremacy simply as a branch of her 
ordinary prerogative. Not only were the clergy her .^'^'^iects, but they 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



467 



were more her subjects than the laity. She treated them in fact as 
her predecessors had treated the Jews. If she allowed nobody else to 
abuse or to rob them, she robbed and abused them herself to her heart's 
content. ' But the theory which James held as to Church and State 
was as different from that of Elizabeth, as the tfcieological bent of his 
mind was different from her secular temper. \ His patristic read- 
ing had left behind it the belief in a Divine right of Bishops, as 
sacred and as absolute as the Divine right of Kings, Unbroken 
episcopal succession and hereditary regal succession were with the 
new sovereign the inviolable bases of Church and State. The two 
systems confirmed and supported each other. " No bishop, no King," 
ran the famous formula v^hich embodied the King's theory. But 
behind his intellectual convictions lay a host of prejudices derived 
from his youth. The Scotch Presbyters had insulted and frightened | 
him in the early days of his reign, and he chose to confound Puritan- 
ism with Presbyterianism. No prejudice however was really required 
to suggest his course. In itself it was logical, and consistent with the 1 
premisses from which it started. The very ceremonies which the : 
Puritans denounced were ceremonies which had plenty of authority \ 
in the writings of the Fathers. That they were offensive to con- j 
sciences seemed to the King no reason whatever for suppressing them. 
It was for the Christian to submit, as it was for the subject to submit, j 
and to leave these high matters to bishops and princes for decision, j 
If James accepted the Millenarian Petition, and summoned a conference | 
of prelates and Puritan divines at Hampton Court, it was not for any 
real discussion of the grievances alleged, but for the display of his ov/n 
theological learning. The bishops had the wit to declare that the 
insults he showered on their opponents were dictated by the Holy 
Ghost. The Puiita.ns still ventured to dispute his infallibility. James 
broke up the conference with a threat which revealed the policy of the 
Crown. " I will make them conform," he said of the remonstrants, "or 
I will harry them out of the land." 

It is only by thoroughly realizing the temper of the nation on re- 
ligious and civil subjects, and the temper of the King, that we can 
understand the long Parliamentary conflict which occupied the whole 
of James's reign. But to make its details intelligible we must 
briefly review the relations which existed at his accession between 
die two Houses and the Crown. In an earlier part of this work 
we have noted the contrast between Wolsey and Cromwell in their 
dealings with the Parliament. The wary prescience of the first 
had seen in it, even in its degradation under the Tudors, the 
memorial of an older freedom, and a centre of national resistance 
to the new despotism which Henry was establishing, should the 
nation ever rouse itself to resist. Never perhaps was English liberty 
in such deadly peril as when Wolsey resolved on the practical 

H H 2 



Sec. II. 

The 
First or 

THE 

Stuarts 
1604- 
1623. 



Tbe 
Crown 
and the 
Parlia- 
xnent. 



468 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



suppression of the two Houses. But the bolder genius of Cromwell 
set contemptuously aside the apprehensions of his predecessor. His 
confidence in the power of the Crow^n revived the Parliament as 
an easy and manageable instrument of tyranny. The old forms 
of constitutional freedom were turned to the profit of the Royal 
despotism, and a revolution which for the moment left England 
absolutely at Henry's feet was wrought out by a series of Parlia- 
mentary Statutes. Throughout Henry's reign Cromwell's confidence 
seemed justified by the spirit of slavish submission which pervaded 
the Houses. On only one occasion did the Commons refuse to pass 
a bill brought forward by the Crown. But the effect of the great 
religious change for which Cromwell's measures made room began to be 
felt during the minority of Edward the Sixth ; and the debates and 
divisions on the religious reaction which Mary pressed on the Parlia- 
ment were many and violent. A great step forward was marked by 
the effort of the Crown to neutralize by " management " an opposition 
which it could no longer overawe. An unscrupulous use of the Royal 
prerogative packed the Parliament with nominees of the Crown. 
Twenty-two new boroughs were created under Edward, fourteen 
under Mary ; some, indeed, places entitled to representation by their 
wealth and population, but the bulk of them small towns or hamlets 
which lay wholly at the disposal of the Royal Council. But the 
increasing pressure of the two Houses was seen in the further step 
on which Edward's Council ventured in issuing a circular to the 
Sheriffs, in which they were ordered to set all freedom of election 
aside. Where the Council recommended "men of learning and 
wisdom," in other words men compliant with its will, there its direc- 
tions were to be "regarded and well followed." Elizabeth, though with 
greater caution, adopted the system of her two predecessors, both in the 
creation of boroughs and the recommendation of candidates ; but her 
keen political instinct soon perceived the uselessness of both expedients. 
She fell back as far ac she could on Wolsey's pohcy of practical abolition, 
and summoned Parliaments at longer and longer intervals. By rigid 
economy, by a policy of balance and peace, she strove, and for a long 
time successfully strove, to avoid the necessity of assembling them 
at all. But Mary of Scotland and Philip of Spain proved friends 
to Enghsh liberty in its sorest need. The death-struggle with Catho- 
licism forced Elizabeth to have recourse to her Parliament, and as she 
was driven to appeal for increasing supplies the tone of the Parlia- 
ment rose higher and higher. On the question of taxation or mono- 
pohes her fierce spirit was forced to give way to its demands. On 
the question of rehgion she refused all concession, and England was 
driven to await a change of system from her successor. But it is 
clear, from the earlier acts Of his reign, that James had long before 
his accession been preparing for a struggle with the Houses, rather 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



469 



than foT a policy of concession. During the Queen's reign, the power 
of Parliament had sprung mainly from the continuance of the war, and 
from the necessity under which the Crown lay of appeahng to it for sup- 
plies. It is fair to the war party in Elizabeth's Council to remember 
that they were fighting, not merely for Protestantism abroad, but for 
constitutional liberty at home. When Essex overrode Burleigh's counsels 
of peace, the old minister pointed to the words of the Bible, " a blood- 
thirsty man shall not live out half his days." But Essex and his 
friends had nobler motives for their policy of war than a thirst for 
blood ; as James had meaner motives for his policy of peace than a 
hatred of bloodshedding. The peace which he hastened to conclude 
with Spain was intended to free the Crown from its dependence on 
the Parliament ; and had he fallen back after the close of the war on 
Elizabeth's policy of economy, he might yet have succeeded in his aim. 
But the debt left by the war was only swollen by his profligate ex- 
travagance ; and peace was hardly concluded when he was forced to 
appeal once more to his Parliament for supplies. 

The Parliament of 1604 met in another mood from that of any 
Parliament which had met for a hundred years. Short as had 
been the time since his accession, the temper of the King had already 
disclosed itself ; and men were dwelling ominously on the claims of 
absolutism in Church and State which were constantly on the Royal 
lips. Above all, the hopes of religious concessions to w^liich the Puri- 
tans had clung had been dashed to the ground in the Hampton Court 
Conference ; and of the squires and burgesses who made up the 
new House of Commons three-fourths were in sympathy Puritan. , 
The energy vv^hich marked their action from the beginning shows that | 
the insults which James had heaped on the Puritan divines had stirred | 
the temper of the nation at large. The first step of the Commons 
was to name a committee to frame bills for the redress of the more 
crying ecclesiastical grievances ; and the rejection of the measures they 
proposed was at once followed by an outspoken address to the King. 
The Parliament, it said, had come together in a spirit of peace ; '^ Our 
desire was of peace only, and our device of unity." Their aim had 
been to extinguish the long-standing dissension among the ministers, 
and to preserve uniformity by the abandonment of " a few ceremonies 
of small importance," by the redress of some ecclesiastical abuses, 
and by the establishment of an efficient training for a preaching clergy, j 
If they had waived their right to deal with these matters during the | 
old age of Elizabeth, they asserted it now. " Let your Majesty be 
pleased to receive public information from your Commons in Parlia- j 
ment, as well of the abuses in the Church, as in the Civil State and 
Government." The claim of absolutism was met in words which sound 
like a prelude to the Petition of Right. "Your Majesty would be 
misinformed," said their address, ''if any man should deliver that the! 



470 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[CllAr 



Kings of England have any absolute power in themselves either to 
alter religion, or to make any laws concerning the same, otherwise 
than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament." The address 
was met by a petulant scolding from James ; and the bishops, secure 
of the support of the Crown, replied by an act of bold defiance. 
The Canons enacted in the Convocation of 1604 bound the clergy to 
subscribe to the Three Articles, which Parliament had long before 
refused to render obligatory on them ; and compelled all curates and 
lecturers to conform strictly to the rubrics of the prayer-book on 
pain of deprivation. In the following winter, three hundred of the 
Puritan clergy were driven from their livings for non-compliance with 
these requirements. The only help came from an unlooked-for 
quarter. The jealousy which had always prevailed between the civil 
and ecclesiastical courts united with the general resentment of the 
country at these ecclesiastical usurpations to spur the Judges to an 
attack on the High Commission. By a series of decisions on appeal 
they limited its boundless jurisdiction, and restricted its powers of 
imprisonment to cases of schism and heresy. But the Judges were of 
little avail against the Crown ; and James was resolute in his support 
of the bishops. Fortunately his prodigality had already in a few 
years of peace doubled the debt which Elizabeth had left after fifteen 
years of war ; and the course of illegal taxation on which he entered 
was far from supplying the deficit of the Exchequer. His first great 
constitutional innovation was the imposition of Customs duties on 
almost all kinds of merchandise, imported or exported. The imposition 
was not, indeed, without precedent. A duty on imports w^iich had 
been introduced in one or two instances under Mary had been 
extended by Elizabeth to clothes and wine ; but the impost, trivial in 
itself, had been pushed no farther, nor had it ever been claimed oi- 
regarded as more than an exceptional measure of finance. Had 
Elizabeth cared to extend it, her course would probably have been 
gradual and tentative, and have aimed at escaping public observation. 
But James was a fanatical believer in the rights and power of his 
crown, and he cared quite as much to assert his absolute authority 
over taxation as to fill his Treasury. A case therefore was brought 
before the Exchequer Chamber, and the judgment of the Court 
asserted the King's right to levy what Customs duties he would at his 
pleasure. "All customs," said the Judges, "are the effects of foreign 
commerce, but all affairs of commerce and treaties with foreign 
nations belong to the King's absolute power. He therefore, who has 
power over the cause, must have power over the effect." The im- 
portance of a decision which freed the Crown from the necessity of 
resorting to Parliament was seen keenly enough by James. English 
commerce was growing fast, and English merchants were fighting their 
way to the Spice Islands, and establishing settlements in the dominions 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



47 i 



of the Mogul. The judgment gave him a revenue which was sure to 
grow rapidly, and he acted on it with decision. A Royal proclamation 
imposed a system of Customs duties on all articles of export and 
import. But if the new duties came in fast, the Royal debt grew 
faster. The peace expenditure of James exceeded the war expenditure 
of Elizabeth, and necessity forced on the King a fresh assembling of 
Parliament. He forbade the Commons to enter on the subject of 
the new duties, but their remonstrance was none the less vigorous. 
" Finding that your Majesty without advice or counsel of Parliament 
hath lately in time of peace set both greater impositions and more in 
number than any of your noble ancestors did ever in time of war," 
they prayed " that all impositions set without the assent of Parliament 
may be quite abolished and taken away," and that '• a law be made to 
declare that all impositions set upon your people, their goods or 
merchandise, save only by common consent in Parliament, are and 
shall be void." From the new question of illegal taxation they turned, 
with no less earnestness, to the older question of ecclesiastical reform. 
Before granting the supply which the Crown required, they demanded 
that the jurisdiction of the High Commission should be regulated by 
Statute, in other words that ecclesiastical matters should be recognized 
as within the cognizance of Parliament ; and that the deprived ministers 
should again be suffered to preach. Whatever concessions James 
might offer on the subject of the Customs, he would allow no inter- 
ference with his ecclesiastical prerogative ; the Parliament was dis- 
solved, and four years passed before the financial straits of the 
Government forced James to face the two Houses again. But the 
spirit of resistance was now fairly roused. Never had an election 
stirred so much popular passion as that of 1 614. In every case where 
rejection was possible, the Court candidates were rejected. All the 
leading members of the Country party, or as we should call it now the 
Opposition, were again returned. But three hundred of the members 
were wholly new men ; and among these we note for the first time the 
Qames of the great leaders in the later struggle with the Crown. 
Somersetshire returned John Pym ; Yorkshire, Thomas Wentworth ; 
St. Germain's, John Eliot. Signs of an unprecedented excitement 
were seen in the vehement cheering and hissing which for the first 
time marked the proceedings of the Commons. But the poHcy of 
the Parliament was precisely the same as that of its predecessors. 
The Commons refused to grant supplies till grievances had been 
redressed, and fixed on that of illegal taxation as the first to be 
amended. Unluckily the inexperience of the bulk of the members led 
them into quarrelling on a point of privilege with the Lords ; and the 
King, who had been frightened beyond his wont at the vehemence of 
their tone and language, seized on the quarrel as a pretext for their 
dissolution. 



472 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Four of the leading members in the dissolved Parliament were sent 
to the Tower ; and the terror and resentment which it had roused in 
the King's mind were seen in the obstinacy with which he long persisted 
in governing without any Parliament at all. For seven years he 
carried out with a bhnd recklessness his theory of an absolute rule, 
unfettered by any scruples as to the past, or any dread of the future. 
All the abuses which Parliament after Parliament had denounced were 
not only continued, but developed in a spirit of defiance. The 
Ecclesiastical Commission was hounded on to a fresh persecution. 
James had admitted the illegality of Royal proclamations, but he issued 
them now in greater numbers than ever. The refusal of supplies was 
met by persistence in the levy of Customs ; and, when this proved 
insufficient to meet the wants of the Treasury, by falling back on a 
resource, which even Wolsey in the height of the Tudor power had 
been forced to abandon. But the letters from the Royal Council de- 
manding benevolences or loans from every landowner remained gener • 
ally unanswered. In the three years which followed the dissolution of 
1 6 14 the strenuous efforts of the Sheriffs only raised sixty thousand 
pounds, a sum less than two-thirds of the value of a single subsidy ; 
and although the remonstrances of the Avestern counties were roughly 
silenced by the threats of the Council, two counties, those of Hereford 
and Stafford, sent not a penny to the last. In his distress for money 
James was driven to expedients which widened the breach between 
the gentry and the Crown. He had refused to part with the feudal 
privileges which had come down to him from the Middle Ages, such 
as his right to the wardship of young heirs and the marriage of 
heiresses, and these were now recklessly used as a means of fiscal 
extortion. He degraded the nobility by a shameless sale of peerages. 
Of the ninety lay peers whom he left in the Upper House at his death, 
nearly one-half had been created by sheer bargaining during his reign. 
By shifts such as these James put off from day to day the necessity for 
again encountering the one body which could permanently arrest his 
effort after despotic rule. But there still remained a body whose tradition 
was strong enough, not indeed to arrest, but to check it The lawyers 
had been subservient beyond all other classes to the Crown. In the 
narrow pedantry with which they bent before precedents, without 
admitting any distinction between precedents drawn from a time of 
freedom and precedents drawn from the worst times of tyranny, the 
Judges had supported James in his claims to impose Customs duties, 
and even to levy benevolences. But beyond precedents even the 
Judges refused to go. They had done their best, when the case came 
before them, to restrict the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts 
within legal and definite bounds : and when James asserted an inhe- 
rent right in the King to be consulted as to the decision, whenever any 
case affecting the prerogative came before his courts, they timidly, but 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



473 



firmly, repudiated such a right as unknown to tiie law. James sent for 
them to the Royal closet, and rated them hke schoolboys, till they fell 
on their knees, and, with a single exception, pledged themselves to obey 
his will. The Chief-Justice, Sir Edward Coke, a narrow-minded and 
bitter-tempered man, but of the highest eminence as a lawyer, and 
with a reverence for the law that overrode every other instinct, alone 
remained firm. When any case came before him, he answered, he 
would act as it became a judge to act. The provision which then 
made the judicial office tenable at the King's pleasure, but which had 
long been forgotten, was revived to humble the law in the person of 
its chief officer ; and Coke, who had at once been dismissed from the 
Council, was on the continuance of his resistance deprived of his post 
of Chief-Justice. No act of James seems to have stirred a deeper 
horror and resentment among Englishmen than this announcement of 
his will to tamper with the course of justice. It was an outrage on 
the growing sense of law, as the profusion and profligacy of the Court 
were an outrage on the growing sense of morality. The Treasury 
was drained to furnish masques and revels on a scale of unexampled 
splendour. Lands and jewels were lavished on young adventurers, 
whose fair faces caught the Royal fancy. The Court of Elizabeth had 
been as immoral as that of her successor, but its immorality had been 
shrouded by a veil of grace and chivalry. But no veil hid the degrad- 
ing grossness of the Court of James. The King was known to be 
an habitual drunkard, and suspected of vices compared with which 
drunkenness was almost a virtue. Ladies of high rank copied the 
Royal manners, and rolled intoxicated in open Court at the King's 
feet. A scandalous trial showed great nobles and officers of state 
in league with cheats and astrologers and poisoners. James himself 
meddled with justice to obtain a shameful divorce for Lady Essex, the 
most profligate woman of her time ; and her subsequent bridal with one 
of his favourites was celebrated in his presence. Before scenes such 
as these, the half-idolatrous reverence with which the sovereign had 
been regarded throughout the period of the Tudors died away into 
abhorrence and contempt. The players openly mocked at the King 
on the stage. Mrs. Hutchinson denounces the orgies of Whitehall 
in words as fiery as those with which Elijah denounced the sensuality 
of Jezebel. But the immorality of James's Court was hardly more 
despicable than the imbecility of his government. In the silence of 
Parliament, the Royal Council, composed as it was not merely of 
•■he ministers, but of the higher nobles and great officers of state, had 
served even under a despot like Henry the Eighth as a check upon 
whe purely arbitrary authority of the Crown. But after the death of 
Lord Burleigh's son, Robert Cecil, the minister whom Elizabeth had 
bequeathed to him, and whose services in procuring his accession 
were rewarded by the Earldom of Salisbury, all real control over affairs 



474 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



was withdrawn by James from the Council, and entrusted to worthless 
favourites whom the King chose to raise to honour. A Scotch page 
named Carr was created Earl of Rochester, married after her divorce 
to Lady Essex, and only hurled from favour and power by the discovery 
of a horrible crime, the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by poison, of 
which he and his Countess were convicted of being the instigators. 
But the shame of one favourite only hurried James into the choice of 
another; and George Viliiers, a handsome young adventurer, was 
raised rapidly through every rank of the peerage, made Marquis and 
Duke of Buckingham, and entrusted with the direction of English 
policy. The payment of bribes to him, or marriage with his greedy 
relatives, soon became the only road to political preferment. Resist- 
ance to his will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office. 
Even the highest and most powerful of the nobility were made to 
tremble at the nod of this young upstart " Never any man in any 
age, nor, I believe, in any country," says the astonished Clarendon, 
" rose in so short a time to so much greatness of honour, power, or 
fortune, upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the 
beauty or gracefulness of his person." But the selfishness and reck- 
lessness of Buckingham were equal to his beauty ; and the haughty 
young favourite on whose neck James loved to loll, and whose cheek 
he slobbered with kisses, was destined to drag down in his fatal career 
the throne of the Stuarts. 

The new system was even more disastrous in its results abroad than 
at home. The withdrawal of power from the Council left James in 
effect his own prime minister, and master of the control of affairs as 
no English sovereign had been before him. At his accession he 
found the direction of foreign affairs in the hands of Cecil, and so 
long as Cecil lived the Elizabethan policy was in the main adhered to. 
Peace, indeed, was made with Spain ; but a close alliance with tlie 
United Provinces, and a close friendship with France, held the ambi- 
tion of Spain as effectually in check as war. No sooner did signs of 
danger appear in Germany from the bigotry of the House of Austria, 
than the marriage of the King's daughter, Elizabeth, with the Elector- 
Palatine promised English support to its Protestant powers. It was, 
indeed, mainly to the firm direction of English poHcy during Cecirs 
ministry that the preservation of peace throughout Europe was due. 
But the death of Cecil, and the dissolution of the Parhament of 1614, 
were quickly followed by a disastrous change. James at once pro- 
ceeded to undo all that the struggle of Ehzabeth and the triumph of 
the Armada had done. He withdrew gradually from the close con- 
nexion with France. He began a series of negotiations for the marriage 
of his son with a Princess of Spain. Each of his successive favourites 
supported the Spanish alliance ; and after years of secret intrigue the 
King's intentions were proclaimed to th€ world, at the moment when 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



475 



the religious truce which had so long preserved the peace of Germany , 
was broken by the revolt of Bohemia against the Austrian Archduke | 
Ferdinand, who claimed its crown, and by its election of the Elector- 1 
Palatine to the vacant throne. From whatever quarter the first aggres- ' 
sion had come, it was plain that a second great struggle in arms 
between Protestantism and Catholicism was now to be fought out on 
German soil. It was their prescience of the coming conflict, and of the 
pitiful part which James would play in it, which, on the very eve of the 
crisis, spurred the Protestant party among his ministers to support an 
enterprise which promised to detach the King from his new policy 
by entangling him in a war with Spain. Sir Walter Raleigh, the 
one great name of the Elizabethan time that still lingered on, had 
been imprisoned ever since the beginning of the new reign in the 
Tower on a charge of treason. He nov*^ offered to sail to the Orinoco, 
and discover a gold mine which he believed to exist on its banks. 
Guiana was Spanish ground ; and the appeal to the King^s cupidity 
was backed by the Protestant party with the purpose of bringing on, 
through RaleigVs settlement there, a contest with Spain. But though 
he yielded to the popular feehng in suffering Raleigh to sail, James had 
given previous warning of the voyage to his new ally ; and the expe- 
dition had hardly landed, when it was driven back with loss from the 
coast. Raleigh's attempt to seize the Spanish treasure-ships on his 
return, with the same aim of provoking a war, was defeated by a 
mutiny among his crews ; and the death of the broken-hearted adven- 
turer on the scaffold atoned for the affront to Spain. But the failure of 
Raleigh's efforts to anticipate the crisis quickened the anxiety of the 
people at large when the crisis arrived. The German Protestants 
were divided by the fatal jealousy between their Lutheran and Calvinist 
princes ; but it was believed that England could unite them, and it was 
on England's support that the Bohemians counted when they chose 
James's son-in-law for their king. A firm policy would at any rate 
have held Spain inactive, and limited the contest to Germany itself. 
But the " statecraft " on which James prided himself led him to count, 
not on Spanish fear, but on Spanish friendship. He refused aid to 
the Protestant union of the German Princes when they espoused the 
cause of Bohemia, and threatened war against Holland, the one power 
which was earnest in the Palatine's cause. It was in vain that both 
Court and people were unanimous in their cry for war; that Arch- 
bishop Abbot from his sick-bed implored the King to strike one blow for 
Protestantism ; that Spain openly took part with the Catholic League, 
which had now been formed under the Elector of Bavaria, and 
marched an army upon the Rhine. James still pressed his son-in-law 
to withdraw from Bohemia, and counted on his influence with Spain 
to induce its armies to retire v/hen once the Bohemian struggle was 
over. But a battle before the walls of Prague, which crushed the 



Sec. n. 



-*w...- f 



476 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sf.c. II. 

The 
First of 

THE 

Stuarts. 
1604- 
1623. 

1620. 



The Par- 
liament 
of 1621. 



Bohemian revolt, drove Frederick back on the Rhine, to find the 
Spaniards encamped as its masters in the heart of the Palatinate. 
James had been duped, and for the moment he bent before the burst 
of popular fury which the danger to German Protestantism called up. 
A national subscription for the defence of the Palatinate enabled its 
Elector to raise an army ; and his army was joined by a force of 
English volunteers under Sir Horace Vere. The cry for a Parliament, 
the necessary prelude to a war, overpowered the King's secret resist- 
ance, and the warlike speech with which he opened its session roused 
an enthusiasm which recalled the days of Elizabeth. 

The Commons answered the King^s appeal by a unanimous vote — 
"lifting their hats as high as they could hold them" — that for the 
recovery of the Palatinate they would adventure their fortunes, their 
estates, and their lives. " Rather this declaration," cried a leader of 
the Country party when it was read by the Speaker, " than ten thousand 
men already on the march ! " But it met with no corresponding 
pledge or announcement of policy from James ; on the contrary, he 
gave license for the export of arms to Spain. As yet constitutional 
grievances had been passed by, but the Royal defiance roused the 
Commons to revive a Parliamentary right which had slept ever since 
the reign of Edward the Third, the right of the Lower House to 
impeach great offenders at the bar of the Lords. The new weapon 
was put to a summary use. The most crying constitutional grievance 
sprang from the revival of monopolies, after the pledge of Elizabeth 
to suppress them ; and the impeachment of a host of monopolists 
again put an end to this attempt to raise a revenue for the Crown 
without a grant from Parliament. But the blow at the corruption of 
the Court which followed was of a far more serious order. Not 
I only was the Chancellor, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, and Earl of 
I St. Albans, the most distinguished man of his time for learning and 
I abihty, but his high position as an officer of the Crown made his 
impeachment for bribery a direct claim on the Parliament's part to 
supervise the Royal administration. James was too shrewd to mistake 
the importance of the step ; but the hostility of Buckingham to the 
Chancellor, and Bacon's own confession of his guilt, made it difficult to 
resist his condemnation. Energetic too as its measures were, the- 
Parliament respected scrupulously the King's prejudices in otheil 
matters ; and even when checked iDy an adjournment, resolved unani-* 
mously to support him in any earnest effort for the Protestant cause. 
\ For the moment its resolve gave vigour to the Royal policy. James. 
I had aimed throughout at the restitution of Bohemia to Ferdinand, andl 
: at inducing the Emperor, through the mediation of Spain, to abstain? 
' from any retaliation on the Palatinate. He now freed himself for a 
i moment from the trammels of diplomacy, and enforced a cessation 
; of the attack on his son-in-law's dominions by a threat of war. The 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



477 



suspension of arms lasted through the summer ; but mere threats could 
do no more, and on the conquest of the Upper Palatinate at the close of 
the truce by the forces of the Catholic League, James suddenly returned 
to his old resolve to rely on negotiations, and on the friendly media- 
tion of Spain. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, who had become 
all-powerful at the English Court, was assured that no effectual aid 
should be sent to the Palatinate. The English fleet, which was 
cruising by way of menace off the Spanish coast, was called home. 
The King dismissed those of his ministers w^ho still opposed a Spanish 
policy ; and threatened on trivial pretexts a war with the Dutch, the 
one great Protestant power that remained in alliance with England, 
and was ready to back the Elector. But he had still to reckon with 
his Parliament ; and the first act of the Parliament on its re-assembling 
was to demand a declaration of war with Spain. The instinct of 
the nation was wiser than the statecraft of the King. Ruined and 
enfeebled as she really was, Spain to the world at large still seemed 
the champion of Catholicism. It was the entry of her troops into the 
Palatinate which had first widened the local war in Bohemia into a 
great struggle for the suppression of Protestantism along the Rhine ; 
above all it was Spanish influence, and the hopes held out of a 
marriage of his son with a Spanish Infanta, which were luring the King 
into his fatal dependence on the great enemy of the Protestant cause. 
In their petition the Houses coupled with their demands for war the 
demand of a Protestant marriage for their future King. Experience 
proved in later years how perilous it was for English freedom that the 
heir to the Crown should be brought up under a Catholic mother ; but 
James was beside himself at their presumption in dealing with mysteries 
of State. " Bring stools for the Ambassadors,^^ he cried in bitter irony 
as the committee of the Commons appeared before him. He refused 
the petition, forbade any further discussion of State policy, and threat- 
ened the speakers with the Tower. "Let us resort to our prayers," a! 
member said calmly as the King^s letter was read, " and then consider 
of this great business.'' The temper of the Commons was seen in the ^ 
Protestation which met the Royal command to abstain from discus- \ 
sion. The House resolved "That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and \ 
jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright / 
and inheritance of the subjects of England ; and that the arduous and 
urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defence of the Realm, 
and of the Church of England, and the making and maintenance of 
laws, and redress of grievances, which daily happen within this Realm. 
are proper subjects and matter of Council and debate in Parliament. 
And that in the handling and proceeding of those businesses every 
member of the House hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of 
speech to propound, treat, reason, and bring to conclusion the same.'' 
The King answered the Protestation by a characteristic outrage. 



Sec. II. 

The 
First of 

THE 

Stuafts. 
1604.- 
1623. 



47S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Src. TI. 

The 
First of 

THR 

Ttuarts. 
I604 



He sent for the JournpJs of the House, and vdth his own hand tore 
out the pages which contained it. " I will govern," he said, " ac- 
cording to the common weal, but not according to the common 
will." A few days after he dissolved the Parliament. " It is the 
best thing that has happened in the interests of Spain and of the 
Catholic religion since Luther began preaching," wrote the Count 
of Gondomar to his master, in his joy that all danger of war had 
passed away. ^ I am ready to depart," Sir Henry Saville, on the 
other hand, murmured on his death-bed, " the rather that having lived 
in good times I foresee worse." Abroad indeed all was lost ; and 
Germany plunged wildly and blindly forward into the chaos of the 
Thirty Years' War. But for England the victory of freedom was 
practically won. James had himself ruined the system of Elizabeth. 
In his desire for personal government he had destroyed the authority 
I of the Council. He had accustomed men to think lightly of the great 
J ministers of the Crown, to see them browbeaten by favourites, and 
|driven from office for corruption. He had disenchanted his people 
i^of their blind faith in the Crovv^n by a policy at home and abroad which 
ran counter to every national instinct. He had quarrelled with, and 
insulted the Houses, as no English sovereign had ever done before ; and 
all the while he was conscious that the authority he boasted of was 
I passing, without his being able to hinder it, to the Parliament which he 
: outraged. There was shrewdness as well as anger in his taunt at its 
i " ambassadors." A power had at last risen up in the Commons with 
I which the Monarchy was henceforth to reckon. In spite of the King's 
fTpetulant outbreaks, Parliament had asserted and enforced its exclusive 
^4 right to the control of taxation. It had suppressed monopolies. It 
! had reformed abuses in the courts of law. It had revived the right of 
\ impeaching and removing from office even the highest ministers of the 
: Crown. It had asserted its privilege of free discussion on all questions 
: connected with the welfare of the realm. It had claim.ed to deal with 
; the question of religion. It had even declared its will on the sacred 
" mystery '^ of foreign policy. James might tear the Protestation from 
its Journals, but there were pages in the record of the Parliament of 
162 1 which he never could tear out. 



Section III — The King: and tlie Parliament. 1623—1629. 

{^Authorities. — ¥ ox. \\\^ first part of this period we have still Mr. Gardiner's 
** Spanish Marriage," a book which throws a full and fresh light on one of 
the most obscure times in our history. From the accession of Charles, we are 
overwhelmed by a host of modem authorities, amongst which Mr. Forster's 
*' Life of Sir John Eliot" stands first in value and interest for the years which 
it embraces. Among the general accounts of the reign of Charles,^ Mr. 
Disraeli's *' Commentaries on the reign of Charles I." is the most prominent 
on the one side; Brodie's *' History of the British Empire/^ and Godwin's 
** History of the Commonwealth," on the other. M. Guizot's work is accaratc 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



I 



and impartial, and Lingard of especial value for the histoij of the English 
Catholics, and for his detail of foreign affairs. For the ecclesiastical side, see | 
Laud's ** Diary." The Commons' Journal gives the proceedings of the Par- 1 
iiaments. Throughout this, as throughout the earlier periods from the , 
accession of Henry the Eighth, the Calendars of State Papers, now issuing | 
under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, are of the greatest historic i 
value.] j 



Sfx. III. 
The King 

AND 

THE Par- 
liament. 
1623- 
1629. 



In the obstinacy with which he clung to his Spanish policy James 
stood absolutely alone; for not only the old nobility and the statesmen 
who preserved the tradition of the age of Elizabeth, but even his own 
ministers, with the exception of Buckingham, were at one with the 
Commons. The King's aim, as we have said, was to enforce peace on 
the combatants, and to bring about the restitution of the Palatinate 
10 the Elector, through the influence of Spain. It was to secure 
this influence that he pressed for a closer union with the great 
Catholic power ; and of this union, and the success of the policy 
which it embodied, the marriage of his son Charles with the Infanta, 
which had been held out as a lure to his vanity, was to be the sign. 
The more, however, James pressed for this consummation of his pro- 
jects, the more Spain held back ; but so bent was the King on its reali- 
zation that, after fruitless negotiations, the Prince quitted England in 
disguise, and appeared with Buckingham at Madrid to claim his pro- 
mised bride. It was in vain that the Spanish Court rose in its demands ; 
for every new demand was met by fresh concessions on the part of 
England. The abrogation of the penal laws against the Catholics, a 
Catholic education for the Prince's children, a Catholic household for 
rhe Infanta, all were no sooner asked than they were granted. But the 
marriage was still delayed, while the influence of the new policy on the 
war in Germany was hard to see. The Catholic League, and its army 
under the command of Count Tilly, won triumph after triumph over their 
divided foes. The reduction of Heidelberg and Mannheim completed 
the conquest of the Palatinate, whose Elector fled helplessly to Holland, 
while his Electoral dignify was transferred by the Emperor to the Duke 
of Bavaria. But there was still no sign of the hoped-for intervention 
on. the part of Spain. At last the pressure of Charles himself brought 
H.bout the disclosure of the secret of its policy. " It is a maxim of 
tate with us," the Duke of Olivarez confessed, as the Prince demanded 
fvn energetic interference in Germany, '' that the King of Spain must 
never fight against the Emperor. We cannot employ our forces 
against the Emperor." " If you hold to that," replied the Prince, 
*^ there is an end of all." 

His return was the signal for a burst of national joy. All London 
was alight with bonfires, in her joy at the failure of the Spanish match, 
and of the collapse, humiliating as it was, of the policy which had so 
long trailed English honour at the chariot-wheels of Spain. Charles 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



returned with the fixed resolve to take the direction of affairs out of his 
father's hands. The journey to Madrid had revealed to those around 
him the strange mixture of obstinacy and weakness in the Prince's 
character, the duplicity which lavished promises because it never 
purposed to be bound by any, the petty pride that subordinated every 
political consideration to personal vanity or personal pique. He had 
granted demand after demand, till the very Spaniards lost faith in his 
concessions. With rage in his heart at the failure of his efforts, he 
had renewed his betrothal on the very eve of his departure, only that he 
might insult the Infanta by its withdrawal when he was safe at home. 
But to England at large the baser features of his character were still 
unknown. The stately reserve, the personal dignity and decency of 
manners which distinguished the Prince, contrasted favourably with the 
gabble and indecorum of his father. The courtiers indeed who saw 
him in his youth, would often pray God that "he might be in the right 
way when he set ; for if he was in the wrong he would prove the most 
wilful of any king that ever reigned." But the nation was willing to take 
his obstinacy for firmness ; as it took the pique which inspired his 
course on his return for patriotism and for the promise of a nobler rule. 
His first acts were energetic enough. The King was forced to summon 
a Parliament, and to concede the point on which he had broken with the 
last, by laying before it the whole question of the Spanish negotiations. 
Buckingham and the Prince personally joined the Parliament in its de- 
mand for a rupture of the treaties and a declaration of war. A subsidy 
was eagerly voted ; the persecution of the Catholics, which had long 
been suspended out of deference to Spanish intervention, recommenced 
with vigour. The head of the Spanish party in the ministry, Cranfield, 
Earl of Middlesex, the Lord Treasurer, was impeached on a charge of 
corruption, and dismissed from office. James was swept along help 
lessly by the tide ; but, helpless as he was, his shrewdness saw clearly 
enough the turn that things were really taking. " You are making a 
rod for your own back," he said to Buckingham, when his favourite 
pressed him to consent to Cranfield's disgrace. But Charles and 
Buckingham were still resolute in their project of war. The Spanish 
ambassador quitted the realm; a treaty of alliance was concluded withi 
Holland; negotiations were begun with the Lutheran Princes of North! 
Germany, who had looked coolly on at the ruin of the Calvinistic Elector- 
Palatine ; and the marriage of Charles with Henrietta, a daughter of 
Henry the Fourth of France, and sister of its King, promised a 
renewal of the system of Elizabeth. At this juncture the death of the 
old King placed Charles upon the throne ; and his first Parhament 
met him in a passion of loyalty. " We can hope everything from the 
King who now governs us," cried one of the leading patriots of the 
Commons. But there were cooler heads in the Commons than Sir 
Benjamin Rudyard's; and, loyal as the Parliament was, enough had 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



481 



taken place in the short interval between the accession of the new 
monarch and its assembling to temper its loyalty with caution. 

The war with Spain, it must be remembered, meant to common 
Englishmen a w^ar with Catholicism ; and the fervour against Popery 
without roused a corresponding fervour against Popery within the 
realm. Every Papist seemed to Protestant eyes an enemy at home. 
A Churchman who leaned to Popery was a traitor in the ranks. 
The temper of the Commons on these points was clear to every 
observer. "Whatever mention does break forth of the fears or 
dangers in religion, and the increase of Popery," wrote a member 
who was noting the proceedings of the House, " their affections are 
much stirred." But Charles had already renewed the toleration of 
the Catholics, and warned the House to leave priest and recusant 
to the discretion of the Crown. It was soon plain that his ecclesi- 
astical policy would be even more hostile to the Puritans than that 
of his father had been. Bishop Laud was put practically at the 
head of ecclesiastical affairs, and Laud had at once drawn up a list 
of ministers divided ominously into ** orthodox " and " Puritan." The 
nost notorious among the High Church divines. Doctor Montagu, 
advocated in his sermons the Divine right of Kings and the Real 
Presence, besides slighting the Protestant churches of the Continent in 
favour of the Church of Rome. The first act of the Commons was to 
summon Montagu to their bar, and to commit him to the Tower. But 
there were other grounds for their distrust besides the King's ecclesiasti- 
cal tendency. The subsidy of the last Parliament had been wasted, yet 
Charles still refused to declare with what power England was at war, 
or to avow that the great fleet he was manning was destined to act 
against Spain. The real part which he had played in the marriage 
negotiations had gradually been revealed, and the discovery had de- 
stroyed all faith in his Protestant enthusiasm. His reserve therefore 
was met by a corresponding caution. While voting a subsidy, the 
Commons restricted their grant of certain Customs duties, which had 
commonly been granted to the new sovereign for life, to a single year. 
The restriction was taken as an insult ; Charles refused to accept the 
'^rant, and Buckingham resolved to brea^ with the Parliament at any 
cost. He suddenly demanded a new subsidy, a demand made merely 
to be denied, and which died without debate. But the denial increased 
the King^s irritation, and he marked it by drawing Montagu from the 
Tower, by promoting him to a Royal chaplaincy, and by levying the 
disputed customs on his own authority. The Houses met at Oxford in 
a sterner temper. " England," cried Sir Robert Philips, " is the last 
monarchy that yet retains her liberties. Let them not perish now ! " 
But the Commons had no sooner announced their resolve to consider 
Dublic grievances before entering ox\ other business than they were met 
by a dissolution. Buckingham, who was more powerful with Charles' 

1 I 



482 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 
The King 

THE PaR- 

I.IAMENT- 

1629. 



Eliot. 



than he had been with his father, had resolved to lure England from 
her constitutional struggle by a great military triumph ; and staking 
everything on success, he sailed for the Hague to conclude a general 
alhance against the House of Austria, while a fleet of ninety vessels 
and ten thousand soldiers left Plymouth for the coast of Spain. But 
if the projects of Charles were bolder than those of his predecessor, 
his execution of them was just as incapable. The alliance broke 
utterly down. After an idle descent on Cadiz the Spanish expedition 
returned, broken with mutiny and disease. The enormous debt which 
had been incurred in its equipment forced the favourite to advise a new 
summons of the Houses ; but he was keenly alive to the peril in which 
his failure had plunged him, and to a coahtion which had been formed 
between his rivals at Court and the leaders of the last Parliament. 
His reckless daring led him to anticipate the danger, and by a series 
of blows to strike terror into his opponents. Lord Pembroke was 
forced to a humiliating submission ; Lord Arundel was sent to the 
Tower. Sir Thomas Wentworth, Cope, and four other leading patriots 
were made Sheriffs of their counties, and thus prevented from sitting 
in the coming Parliament. But their exclusion only left the field free 
for a more terrible foe. 

If Hampden and Pym are the great figures which embody the later 
national resistance, the earlier struggle for Parliamentary liberty 
centres in the figure of Sir John Eliot. Of an old family — ennobled 
since his time— which had settled under Elizabeth near the fishing 
hamlet of St. Germain s, and whose stately mansion gives its name of 
Port Eliot to a little town on the Tamar^ he had risen to the post of 
Vice-Admiral of Devonshire under the patronage of Buckingham, and 
had seen his activity in the suppression of piracy in the Channel re- 
warded by an unjust imprisonment. He was now in the first vigour of 
manhood, with a mind exquisitely cultivated and familiar with the poetry 
and learning of his day, a nature singularly lofty and devout, a fearless 
and vehement temper. There was a hot impulsive element in his nature 
which showed itself in youth in his drawing sword on a neighbour who 
denounced him to his father, and which in later years gave its charac- 
teristic fire to his eloquence. But his intellect was as clear and cool 
as his temper was ardent. In the general enthusiasm which followed 
I on the failure of the Spanish Marriage, he had stood almost alone in 
pressing for a recognition of the rights of Parliament, as a preliminary 
to any real reconcihation with the Crown. He fixed, from the very 
i outset of his career, on the responsibihty of the royal ministers to Parha- 
' ment, as the one critical point for English liberty. It was to enforce 
the demand of this that he availed himself of Buckingham's sacrifice 
of the Treasurer, Cranfield, to the resentment of the Commons. " The 
: greater the dehnquent," he urged, " the greater the deUct. They are a 
i happy thing, great men and officers, if they be good, and one of the 



VIII. "1 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



4S3. 



^eatest blessings of the land : but power converted into evil is the 
greatest curse that can befall it." But the new Parliament had hardly 
net, when he came to the front to threaten a greater criminal than 
Z!ranfield. So menacing w^ere his words, as he called for an inquiry into 
:he failure before Cadiz, that Charles himself stooped to answer threat 
^.vith threat. "I see," he wrote to the House, "you especially aim at 
the Duke of Buckingham. I must let you know that I will not allow 
any of my servants to be questioned among you, much less such as 
are of eminent place and near to me." A more direct attack on a 
right already acknowledged in the impeachment of Bacon and Cran- 
iield could hardly be imagined, but Eliot refused to move from his 
constitutional ground. The King was by law irresponsible, he " could 
do no wrong." If the countr>^ therefore was to be saved from a pure 
despotism, it must be by enforcing the responsibility of the ministers 
who counselled and executed his acts. Eliot persisted in denouncing 
Buckingham's incompetence and corruption, and the Commons ordered 
the subsidy which the Crown had demanded to be brought in " when 
w^e shall have presented our grievances, and received his Majesty's 
answer thereto." Charles summoned them to Whitehall, and com- 
manded them to cancel the condition. He would grant them "liberty 
of counsel, but not of control ;" and he closed the inter\dev/ with a 
significant threat. "Remember," he said, "that Parliaments are 
altogether in my powder for their calling, sitting, and dissolution : 
and therefore, as I find the fruits of them to be good or evil, they 
are to continue or not to be." But the will of the Commons was 
as resolute as the will of the King. Buckingham's impeachment 
\vas voted and carried to the Lords. The favourite took his seat 
as a peer to listen to the charge with so insolent an air of con- 
tempt that one of the managers appointed by the Commons to con- 
duct it turned sharply on him. "Do you jeer, my Lord ! " said Sir 
Dudley Digges. " I can show you when a g-reater man than your 
Lordship — as high as you in place and powder, and as deep in the King^s 
favour — has been hanged for as small a crime as these articles contain." 
The "proud carriage" of the Duke provoked an invective from EHot 
v/hich marks a new era in Parliamentary speech. From the £rst the 
vehemence and passion of his words had contrasted with the grave, 
colourless reasoning of older speakers. His opponents complained 
that Eliot aimed to "' stir up affections." The quick emphatic sentences 
he substituted for the cumbrous periods of the day, his rapid argument, 
his vivacious and caustic allusions, his passionate appeals, his fearless 
invective, struck a new note in English eloquence. The frivolous 
ostentation of Buckingham, his very figure blazing with jewels and 
gold, gave point to the fierce attack. "He has broken those nerves 
and sinews of our land, the stores and treasures of the King. There 
needs no search for it. It is too visible. His profuse expenses, his 

I I 2 



\ 



Sec. III. 
The King 

AND 
THE PaR- 
LTAMENT. 

1623. 
1629. 



484 



Sec. III. 
The King 

AND 

THE Par- 
liament. 
1623- 
1629. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



The King 
and the 
People. 



superfluous feasts, his magnificent buildings, his riots, his excesses,, 
what are they but the visible evidences of an express exhausting of the 
State, a chronicle of the immensity of his waste of the revenues of 
the Crown ? " With the same terrible directness Eliot reviewed the 
Duke's greed and corruption, his insatiate ambition, his seizure of al! 
public authority, his neglect of every public duty, his abuse for selfish 
ends of the powers he had accumulated. "The pleasure of his 
Majesty, his known directions, his public acts, his acts of council, the 
decrees of courts — all must be made inferior to this man's will. N© 
right, no interest may withstand him. Through the power of state 
and justice he has dared ever to strike at his own ends." " My Lords,'* 
he ended, after a vivid parallel between Buckingham and Sejanus, "you 
see the man ! What have been his actions, what he is like, you know ! 
I leave him to your judgment. This only is conceived by us, the 
knights, citizens, and burgesses of the Commons House of Parliament, 
that by him came all our evils, in him we find the causes, and on him' 
must be the remedies ! Pereat qui perdere cuncta festinat. Opprimatur 
ne omnes opprimat ! " 

The reply of Charles was as fierce and sudden as the attack of 
Eliot. He hurried to the House of Peers to avow as his own the 
deeds with which Buckingham was charged. Eliot and Digges were 
called from their seats, and committed prisoners to the Tower. The 
Commons, however, refused to proceed with public business till their 
members were restored ; and after a ten-days' struggle Eliot was 
released. But his release was only a prelude to the close of the Parha- 
ment. " Not one moment," the King replied to the prayer of his Coun- 
cil for delay ; and the final remonstrance in which the Commons 
begged him to dismiss Buckingham from his service for ever was- 
met by their instant dissolution. The remonstrance was burnt by 
Royal order, Eliot was deprived of his Vice-Admiralty, and the 
subsidies which the Parliament had refused to grant till their griev- 
ances were redressed were levied in the arbitrary form of benevo- 
lences. But the tide of public resistance was slowly rising. Re- 
fusals to give anything, " save by way of Parliament," came in fron-s 
county after county. The arguments of the judges, who summoned 
the subsidy-men of Middlesex and Westminster to persuade them to* 
comply, were met by the crowd with a tumultuous shout of " a Par- 
liament ! a Parliament 1 else no subsidies ! " Kent stood out to a man. 
In Bucks the very justices neglected to ask for the "free gift." The 
freeholders of Cornwall only answered that, " if they had but two kine. 
they would sell one of them for supply to his Majesty — in a Parha- 
mentary way." The failure of the voluntary benevolence was met by 
the levy of a forced loan. Commissioners were named to assess the 
amount which every landowner was bound to lend, and to examine on 
oath all who refused. Every means of persuasion, as of force, wa^ 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



455 



resorted to. The High Church pulpits resounded with the cry of 
** passive obedience.'' Dr. Mainwaring preached before Charles him- 
self, that the King needed no Parliamentary warrant for taxation, and 
that to resist his will was to incur eternal damnation. Soldiers were 
quartered on recalcitrant boroughs. Poor men who refused to lend were 
pressed into the army or navy. Stubborn tradesmen were flung into 
prison. Buckingham himself undertook the task of overawing the 
nobles and the gentry. Among the bishops, the Primate and Bishop 
Williams of Lincoln alone resisted the King's will. The first was 
suspended on a frivolous pretext, and the second sent to the Tower. 
But in the country at large resistance was universal. The northern 
counties in a mass set the Crown at defiance. The Lincolnshire 
farmers drove the Commissioners from the town. Shropshire, Devon, 
and Warwickshire " refused utterly." Eight peers, with Lord Essex 
and Lord Warwick at their head, declined to comply with the exaction 
as illegal. Two hundred country gentlemen, whose obstinacy had not 
been subdued by their transfer from prison to prison, were summoned 
before the Council. John Hampden, as yet only a young Buckingham- 
shire squire, appeared at the board to begin that career of patriotism 
which has made his name dear to Englishmen. " I could be content to 
lend," he said, "but fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Charta, 
-which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it." 
So close an imprisonment in the Gate House rewarded his protest, 
*^ that he never afterwards did look like the same man he was before." 
With gathering discontent as well as bankruptcy before him, nothing 
could save the Duke but a great military success ; and he equipped a 
force of seven thousand men for the maddest and most profligate of all his 
enterprises. In the great struggle with Catholicism the hopes of every 
Protestant rested on the union of England with France against the 
House of Austria. From causes never fully explained, but in which 
a personal pique against the French minister, Cardinal Richelieu, 
mingled with the desire to win an easy popularity at home by 
supporting the French Huguenots, Buckingham at this juncture broke 
suddenly with France, sailed in person to the Isle of Rhe, and 
roused the great Huguenot city of Rochelle to revolt. The expedition 
was as disarstrous as it was impolitic. After a useless siege of the 
castle of St. Martin, the English troops were forced to fall back along 
a narrow causeway to their ships ; and in the retreat two thousand fell, 
without the loss of a single man to their enemies. 

The first result of Buckingham's folly was the fall of Rochelle and 
the ruin of the Huguenot cause in France. Indirectly, as we have 
seen, it helped on the ruin of the cause of Protestantism in Ger- 
many. But in England it forced on Charles, overwhelmed as he 
was with debt and shame, the summoning of a new Parliament ; a 
Parliament which met in a mood even more resolute than the last. 



The King 

AND 

THE Par- 
liament. 
1623- 



The 

Petition 

of Right 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



The Court candidates were everywhere rejected. The patriot leaders 
were triumphantly returned. To have suffered in the recent re- 
sistance to arbitrary taxation was the sure road to a seat. In spite of 
Eliofs counsel, all other grievances, even that of Buckingham 
himself, gave place to the craving for redress of wrongs done to 
personal liberty. ^' We must vindicate our ancient liberties/' said 
Sir Thomas Wentworth, in words soon to be remembered against 
himself: "we must reinforce the laws made by our ancestors. We 
must set such a stamp upon them, as no licentious spirit shall dare 
hereafter to invade them.'' Heedless of sharp and menacing mes- 
sages from the King, of demands that they should take his " Royal 
word" for their liberties, the House bent itself to one great work^ 
the drawing up a Petitioa^el-S^ight. The statutes that protected the 
subject against arbitrary taxation, against loans and benevolences^, 
against punishment,, outlawry, or deprivation of goods, otherwise 
than by lawful judgment of his peers, against arbitrary imprison- 
ment without stated charge, against billeting of soldiery on the 
people or enactment of martial law in time of peace, were formally 
recited. The breaches of them under the last two sovereigns, and 
above all since the dissolution of the last Parliament, were recited as 
formally. At the close of this significant list, the Commons prayed 
" that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, 
benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by Act 
of Parliament. And that none be called to make answer, or to take 
such oaths, or to be confined or otherwise molested or disputed 
concerning the same, or for refusal thereof. And that no freeman may 
in such manner as is before mentioned be imprisoned or detained* 
And that your Majesty would be pleased to remove the said soldiers 
and mariners, and that your people may not be so burthened in time 
to come. And that the commissions for proceeding by martial law 
may be revoked and annulled, and that hereafter no commissions of 
like nature may issue forth to any person or persons whatsoever to be 
executed as aforesaid, lest by colour of them any of your Majesty's 
subjects be destroyed and put to death, contrary to the laws and 
franchises of the land. All which they humbly pray of your most 
excellent Majesty, as their rights and liberties, according to the laws 
and statutes of the realm. And that your Majesty would also 
vouchsafe to declare that the awards, doings, and proceedings to the 
prejudice of your people in any of the premisses shall not be drawn 
hereafter into consequence or example. And that your Majesty 
would be pleased graciously for the further comfort and safety of your 
people to declare your Royal will and pleasure, that in the things 
aforesaid all your officers and ministers shall serve you according to 
the laws and statutes of this realm, as they tender the honour of your 
Majesty and the prosperity of the kingdom." It was in vain that the 



VIIl.j 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



487 



Lords desired to conciliate Charles by a reservation of his " sovereign 
power." "Oar petition," Pym quietly repHed, "is for the laws of 
England, and this power seems to be another power distinct from 
the power of the law." The Lords yielded, but Charles gave an 
evasive reply ; and the failure of the more moderate counsels for 
which his own had been set aside, called Eliot again to the front. 
In a speech of unprecedented boldness he moved the presentation 
to the King of a Remonstrance on the state of the realm. But 
at the moment when he again touched on Buckingham's removal 
as the preliminary of any real improvement the Speaker of the 
House interposed. " There was a command laid on him," he said, 
"to interrupt any that should go about to lay an aspersion on 
the King's ministers." The breach of their privilege of free speech 
produced a scene in the Commons such as St. Stephen's had never 
witnessed before. Eliot sate abruptly down amidst the solemn silence 
of the House. " Then appeared such a spectacle of passions," says 
a letter of the tim.e, " as the like had seldom been seen in such an 
assembly : some weeping, some expostulating, some prophecying of 
the fatal ruin of our kingdom, some playing the divines in confessing 
their sins and country's sins which drew these judgments upon us, some 
finding, as it were, fault with those that wept. There were above an 
hundred weeping eyes, many who offered to speak being interrupted 
and silenced by their own passions." Pym himself rose only to sit 
down choked with tears. At last Sir Edward Coke found words to 
blame himself for the timid counsels which had checked Eliot at the 
beginning of the Session, and to protest " that the author and source 
of all those miseries was the Duke of Buckingham." 

Shouts of assent greeted the resolution to insert the Duke's name 
in their Remonstrance. But the danger to his favourite overcame 
the King's obstinacy, and to avert it he suddenly offered to consent 
to the Petition of Right. His consent won a grant of subsidy from 
the Parliament, and such a ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires 
from the people " as were never seen but upon his Majesty's return 
from Spain." But, like all Charles's concessions, it came too late to 
effect the end at which he aimed. The Commons persisted in pre- 
senting their Remonstrance. Charles received it coldly and ungra- 
ciously ; while Buckingham, who had stood defiantly at his master's 
side as he was denounced, fell on his knees to speak. " No, George ! " 
said the King as he raised him ; and his demeanor gave emphatic 
proof that the Duke's favour remained undiminished, "We will 
perish together, George," he added at a later time, "if thou dost." 
No shadow of his doom, in fact, had fallen over the brilliant favourite, 
when, after the prorogation of the Parliament, he set out to take com- 
mand of a new expedition for the relief of Rochelle. But a lieutenant 
in the navy, John Felton, soured by neglect and wrongs, had found in 



Sec. IU. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the Remonstrance some fancied sanction for the revenge he plotted 
and, mixing with the throng which crowded the hall at Portsmouth, he 
stabbed Buckingham to the heart. Charles flung himself on his bed 
in a passion of tears when the news reached him; but outside the Court 
it was welcomed with a burst of joy. Young Oxford bachelors, grave 
London aldermen, vied with each other in drinking healths to Felton. 
" God bless thee, little David," cried an old woman, as the murderer 
passed manacled by ; ^* the Lord comfort thee," shouted the crowd as 
the Tower gates closed on him. The very crews of the Duke's arma- 
ment at Portsmouth shouted to the King, as he witnessed their depar- 
ture, a prayer that he would " spare John Felton, their sometime fellow 
soldier." But whatever national hopes the fall of Buckingham had 
aroused were quickly dispelled. Weston, a creature of the Duke, 
became Lord Treasurer, and his system remained unchanc^ed. 
" Though our Achan is cut off," said Eliot, "the accursed thing 
remains." 

It seemed as if no act of Charles could w^iden the breach which 
his reckless lawlessness had made between himself and his subjects. 
But there was one thing dearer to England than free speech in 
Parliament, than security for property, or even personal liberty; and 
that one thing was, in the phrase of the day, " the Gospel." The gloom 
which at the outset of this reign we saw settling down on every Puritan 
heart had deepened with each succeeding year. The great struggle 
abroad had gone more and more against Protestantism, and at this 
moment the end of the cause seemed to have come. In Germany 
Lutheran and Calvinist alike lay at last beneath the heel of the Catholic 
House of Austria. The fall of Rochelle left the Huguenots of France 
at the feet of a Roman Cardinal. While England was thrilling with 
excitement at the thought that her own hour of deadly peril might 
come again, as it had come in the year of the Armada, Charles 
raised Laud to the Bishopric of London, and entrusted him with the 
direction of ecclesiastical affairs. To the excited Protestantism of 
the country. Laud, and the High Churchmen v/hom he headed, 
seemed a danger more really formidable than the Popery which was 
making such mighty strides abroad. They were traitors at home, 
traitors to God and their country at once. Their aim was to draw 
the Church of England farther away from the Protestant Churches, 
and nearer to the Church which Protestants regarded as Babylon. 
They aped Roman ceremonies. Cautiously and tentatively they were 
introducing Roman doctrine. But they had none of the sacerdotal 
independence which Rome had at any rate preserved. They were 
abject in their dependence on the Crown. Their gratitude for the 
Royal protection which enabled them to defy the religious instincts 
of the realm showed itself in their erection of the most dangerous 
pretensions of the monarchy into rehgious dogmas. Their model, 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



489 



Bishop Andrewes, declared James to have been inspired by God. They 
preached passive obedience to the worst tyranny. They declared the 
person and goods of the subject to be at the King's absokite disposal. 
They turned religion into a systematic attack on Enghsh liberty. Up 
to this time, ho^vever, they had been little more than a knot of courtly 
parsons— for the mass of the clergy, like their flocks, were steady 
Puritans— but the well-known energy of Laud promised a speedy 
increase of their numbers and their power. Sober men looked forward 
to a day when every pulpit would be ringing with exhortations to 
passive obedience, with denunciations of Calvinism and apologies for 
Rome. Of all the members of the House of Commons Eliot vvas least 
fanatical in his natural bent, but the religious crisis swept away for 
the moment all other thoughts from his mind. " Danger enlarges 
itself in so great a measure," he wrote from the country, '' that 
nothing but Heaven shrouds us from despair.'' The House met in 
the same temper. The first business it called up was that of religion. 
''The Gospel," Eliot burst forth, "is that Truth in which this kingdom 
has been happy through a long and rare prosperity. This ground, 
therefore, let us lay for a foundation of our building, that that Truth, 
not with Vi^ords, but with actions we will maintain ! " "There is a cere- 
mony," he went on, " used in the Eastern Churches, of standing at the 
repetition of the Creed, to testify their purpose to maintain it, not only 
with their bodies upright, but wdth their swords drawn. Give me 
leave to call that a custom very commendable ! " The Commons 
answered their leader's challenge by a solemn vow. They avowed 
that they held for truth that sense of the Articles as estabhshed by 
Parliament, which by the public act of the Church, and the general 
and current exposition of the writers of their Church, had been delivered 
unto them. But the debates over religion were suddenly interrupted. 
1 he Commons, who had deferred all grant of customs till the wrong 
done in the illegal levy of them was redressed, had summoned the 
farmers of those dues to the bar ; but though they appeared, they 
pleaded the King's commiand as a ground for their refusal to answer. 
The House w^as proceeding to a protest, when the Speaker signified 
that he had received a Royal order to adjourn. Dissolution was 
clearly at hand, and the long-suppressed indignation broke out in a 
scene of strange disorder. The Speaker was held down in the chair, 
while Eliot, still clinging to his great principle of ministerial responsi- 
bility, denounced the new Treasurer as the adviser of the measure. 
" None have gone about to break Parliaments," he added in words to 
w hich after events gave a terrible significance, " but in the end Parlia- 
ments have broken them." The doors vv^ere locked, and in spite of 
Ihe Speaker's protests, of the repeated knocking of the usher sent by 
Charles to summon the Commons to his presence in the Lords' 
chamber, and of the gathering tumult within the House itself, the loud 



490 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



" Aye, Aye " of the bulk of the members supported Ehot in his last 
vindication of English liberty. By successive resolutions the Commons 
declared whosoever should bring in innovations in religion, or what- 
ever minister advised the levy of subsidies not granted in Parliament, 
" a capital enemy to the Kingdom and Commonwealth,'' and every 
subject voluntarily complying with illegal acts and demands "a 
betrayer of the liberty of England, and an enemy of the same." 

Section IV.— New England. 

\Atithorities. — The admirable account of American colonization given by 
Mr. Bancroft ('* History of the United States ") may be corrected in some 
points of detail by Mr. Gardiner's ** History of England" (cap. vi.), and 
"Spanish Marriage" (cap. xliii.). For Laud himself, see his remarkable 
"Diary." His work at Lambeth is described in Prjnine's scurrilous " Canter- 
bury's Doom." 

The dissolution of the Parliament of 1629 marked the darkest hour 
of Protestantism, whether in England or in the world at large. But it 
was in this hour of despair that the Puritans won their noblest 
triumph. They " turned,'' to use Canning's words in a far truer and 
grander sense than that which he gave to them, they " turned to 
the New World to redress the balance of the Old." It was during the 
years of tyranny which followed the close of the third Parliament of 
Charles that the great Puritan emigration founded the States of New 
England. 

The Puritans were far from being the earliest among the English 
colonists of North America. There was little in the circumstances 
which attended the first discovery of the Western world which promised 
well for freedom ; its earliest result, indeed, was to give an enormous 
impulse to the most bigoted and tyrannical of the Continental powers, 
and to pour the wealth of Mexico and Peru into the treasury of Spain. 
But while the Spanish galleons traversed the Southern seas, and 
Spanish settlers claimed the southern part of the great continent for 
the Catholic crown, the truer instinct of Englishmen drew them to the 
ruder and more barren districts along the shore of Northern America. 
Long before the time of Columbus the fisheries of the North Sea had 
made the merchants of Bristol familiar with the coasts of Greenland ; 
and two years before the great navigator reached the actual mainland 
of America, a Venetian merchant, John Cabot, who dwelt at Bristol, 
had landed with a crew of English sailors among the icy solitudes of 
Labrador. A year later his son, Sebastian Cabot, sailing from the 
same English port to the same point on the American coast, pushed 
south as far as Maryland and north as high as Hudson's Bay. For a ' 
long time, nowever, no one followed in the track of these bold adven- 
turers. While France settled its Canadian colonists along the St 




THE AMERICAN COLONIES 

IN 1640 



Stanford^- G-eographicaL SstahUshnLent. 



London; Macmill sax & C? 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



491 



Lawrence, and Spain — already mistress of the South— extended its 
dominions as far northwards as Florida, the attention of Englishmen 
limited itself to the fisheries of Newfoundland. It was only in the 
reign of Elizabeth that men's thoughts turned again to the discoveries 
of Cabot. Frobisher, in a vessel no bigger thah a man-of-war's 
barge, made his way to the coast of Labrador ; and the false news 
which he brought back of the existence of gold mines there drew 
adventurer after adventurer among the icebergs of Hudson's Straits. 
Luckily the quest of gold proved a vain one ; and the nobler spirits 
among those who had engaged in it turned to plans of colonization. 
But the country, vexed by long winters and thinly peopled by 
warlike tribes of Indians, gave a rough welcome to the earlier 
colonists. After a fruitless attempt to form a settlement. Sir Humphry 
Gilbert, one of the noblest spirits of his time, turned homewards 
ugain, to find his fate in the stormy seas. " We are as near to 
Heaven by sea as by land," were the famous words he was heard to 
utter, ere the light of his little bark was lost for ever in the darkness 
of the night. An expedition sent by his brother-in-law. Sir Walter 
Raleigh, explored Pamlico Sound ; and the country they discovered, 
a country where, in their poetic fancy, " men lived after the manner 
of the Golden Age," received from Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, the 
name of Virginia. The introduction of tobacco and of the potato into 
Europe dates from Raleigh's discovery ; but the energy of his settlers 
was distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the 
native tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the 
gratitude of later times for what he strove to do, rather than for 
what he did, that Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, preserves 
his name. The first permanent settlement on the Chesapeake was 
effected in the beginning of the reign of James the First, and its 
success was due to the conviction of the settlers that the secret of the 
New World's conquest lay simply in labour. Among the hundred and 
five colonists who originally landed, forty-eight were gentlemen, and only 
twelve were tillers of the soil. Their leader, John Smith, however, 
not only explored the vast bay of Chesapeake and discovered the 
Potomac and the Susquehannah, but held the little company together 
in the face of famine and desertion till the colonists had learnt the 
lesson of toil. In his letters to the colonizers at home he set resolutely 
aside the dream of gold. " Nothing is to be expected thence," he 
wrote of the new country, " but by labour ; " and supplies of labourers, 
aided by a wise allotment of lands to each colonist, secured after five 
years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia. " Men fell to building 
houses and planting com ; " the very streets of Jamestown, as their 
capital was called from the reigning sovereign, were sown with tobacco ; 
and in fifteen years the colony numbered five thousand souls. 

The laws and representative institutions of England were first intro- 



492 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



duced into the New World in the settlement of Virginia : ten years later 
a principle as unknown to England as it was to the greater part of 
Europe found its home in a second colony, which received its name orf" 
Maryland from Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles the First. 
Calvert, Lord Baltimore, one of the best of the Stuart counsellors, 
was forced by his conversion to Catholicism to seek a shelter for 
himself and colonists of his new faith in the district across the Potomac, 
and round the head of the Chesapeake. As a purely Catholic settle- 
ment was impossible, he resolved to open the new colony to men of 
every faith. " No person within this province," ran the earliest 
law of Maryland, " professing to believe in Jesus Christ, shall be in 
any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her 
religion, or in the free exercise thereof." Long however before Lord 
Baltimore's settlement in Maryland, only a few years indeed after the 
settlement of Smith in Virginia, the httle church of Brownist or Inde- 
pendent refugees, whom we saw driven in Elizabeth's reign to Rotter- 
dam, had resolved to quit Holland and find a home in the wilds of 
the New World. They were little disheartened by the tidings of 
suffering which came from the Virginian settlement. " We are well 
weaned," wrote their minister, John Robinson, " from the delicate 
milk of the mother-country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange 
land : the people are industrious and frugal. We are knit together 
as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord, of the violation 
whereof we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold 
ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good and of the whole. 
It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage." 
Returning from Holland to Southampton, they started in two small 
vessels for the new land : but one of these soon put back, and only 
its companion, the Mayjlower, a. bark of a hundred and eighty tons, 
with fort3^-one emigrants and their families on board, persisted in pro- 
secuting its voyage. The little company of the " Pilgrim Fathers," as 
after-times loved to call them, landed on the barren coast of Massa- 
chusetts at a spot to which they gave the name of Plymouth, in 
memory of the last EngHsh port at which they touched. They had 
soon to face the long hard winter of the north, to bear sickness 
and famine : even when these years of toil and suffering had passed 
there was a time when " they knew not at night where to have a bit in 
the morning." Resolute and industrious as they were, their progress 
was very slow ; and at the end of ten years they numbered only three 
hundred souls. But small as it was, the colony was now firmly esta- 
blished and the struggle for mere existence was over. '^ Let it not be 
grievous unto you," some of their brethren had written from England 
to the poor emigrants in the midst of their sufferings, " that you have 
I been instrumental to break the ice for others. The honour shall be 
yours to the world's end." 



VTIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



493 



From the moment of their establishment the eyes of the English 
Puritans were fixed on the little Puritan settlement in North 
America. The sanction of the Crown was necessary to raise it into 
a colony ; and the aid which the merchants of Boston in Lincolnshire 
gave to the reahzation of this project was acknowledged in the name 
of its capital. Eight days before announcing his resolve to govern 
henceforth without Parliaments, Charles granted the charter which 
established the colony of Massachusetts ; and by the Puritans at large 
the grant was at once regarded as a Providential call. Out of the 
failure of their great constitutional struggle, and the pressing danger 
to " godhness '^ in England, rose the dream of a land in the West 
where religion and liberty could find a safe and lasting home. The 
third Parliament of Charles was hardly dissolved, when "conclusions'' 
for the establishment of a great colony on the other side the Atlantic 
were circulating among gentry and traders, and descriptions of the 
new country of Massachusetts were talked over in every Puritan 
household. The proposal was welcomed with the quiet, stem 
enthusiasm which marked the temper of the time ; but the words 
of a well-known minister show how hard it was even for the sternest 
enthusiasts to tear themselves from their native land. " I shall 
call that my country," said John Winthrop, in answer to feelings of this 
sort, " where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my 
dearest friends." The answer was accepted, and the Puritan emigra- 
tion began on a scale such as England had never before seen. The 
two hundred who first sailed for Salem were soon followed by Win- 
throp himself with eight hundred men ; and seven hundred more 
followed ere the first year of the Royal tyranny had run its course. 
Nor were the emigrants, like the earlier colonists of the South, " broken 
men," adventurers, bankrupts, criminals ; or simply poor men and 
artisans, like the Pilgrim Fathers of the MayJlowe7\ They were in 
great part men of the professional and middle classes ; some of them 
men of large landed estate, some zealous clergymen like Cotton, 
Hooker, and Roger Williams, some shrewd London lawyers, or young 
scholars from Oxford. The bulk were god-fearing farmers from Lincoln- 
shire and the Eastern counties. They desired in fact " only the best " 
as sharers in their enterprise ; men driven forth from their fatherland not 
by earthly want, or by the greed of gold, or by the lust of adventure, but 
by the fear of God, and the zeal for a godly worship. But strong as 
was their zeal, it was not without a wrench that they tore themselves 
from their English homxs. " Farewell, dear England ! " was the cry \ 
which burst from the first little company of emigrants as its shores { 
faded from their sight. " Our hearts," wrote Winthrop^s followers to 1 
the brethren whom they had left behind, " shall be fountains of tears i 
for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in j 
the wilderness." i 



Sec. IV. 

New 
England. 

The 
Puritan 

Emi- 
gration. 



494 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



During the next two years, as the sudden terror which had found sc 
violent an outlet in Eliot's warnings died for the moment away 
there was a lull in the emigration. But the measures of Laud soor 
revived the panic of the Puritans. The shrewdness of James had reac 
the very heart of the man, when Buckingham pressed for his firs1 
advancement to the see of St. Asaph. " He hath a restless spirit,' 
said the old King, " which cannot see when things are well, but loves 
to toss and change, and to bring matters to a pitch of reformation > 
floating in his own brain. Take him with you, but by my soul you 
will repent it." Cold, pedantic, ridiculous, superstitious as he was (he 
notes in his diary the entry of a robin-redbreast into his study as 2 
matter of grave moment), William Laud rose out of the mass of court- 
prelates by his industry, his personal unselfishness, his remarkable 
capacity for administration. At a later period, when immersed in 
State-business, he found time to acquire so complete a knowledge of 
commercial affairs that the London merchants themselves owned him 
a master in matters of trade. But his real influence was derived from 
the unity of his purpose. He directed all the power of a clear, narrow 
mind, and a dogged will, to the realization of a single aim. His resolve 
was to raise the Church of England to what he conceived to be its reai 
position as a branch, though a reformed branch, of the great Catholic 
Church throughout the world ; protesting alike against the innovations 
of Rome and the innovations of Calvin, and basing its doctrines and 
usages on those of the Christian communion in the centuries which pre- 
ceded the Council of Nicsea. The first step in the realization of such a 
theory was the severance of whatever ties had hitherto united the English 
Church to the Reformed Churches of the Continent. In Laud's view 
episcopal succession was of the essence of a Church, and by their re- 
jection of bishops, the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches of Germany 
and Switzerland had ceased to be Churches at all. The freedom of 
worship therefore which had been allowed to the Huguenot refugees! 
from France, or the Walloons from Flanders, was suddenly withdrawn ;i 
and the requirement of conformity with the Anglican ritual drove themj 
in crowds from the southern ports to seek toleration in Holland. The! 
same conformity was required from the English soldiers and merchants j 
abroad, who had hitherto attended without scruple the services of the 1 
Calvinistic churches. The English ambassador in Paris was forbidden 
to visit the Huguenot conventicle at Charenton. As Laud drew further 
from the Protestants of the Continent, he drew, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, nearer to Rome. His theory owned Rome as a true branch 
of the Church, though severed from that of England by errors and 
innovations against which Laud vigorously protested. But with the 
removal of these obstacles reunion would naturally follow, and his dream 
was that of bridging over the gulf which ever since the Reformation had 
parted the two Churches. The secret offer of a cardinal's hat proved 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



495 



Rome's sense that Laud was doing his work for her ; while his rejection 
of it, and his own reiterated protestations, prove equally that he was 
doing it unconsciously. Union with the great body of CathoHcism, 
indeed, he regarded as a work which only time could bring about, but 
for which he could prepare the Church of England by raising it to a 
higher standard of Catholic feeling and Catholic practice. The great 
obstacle in his way was the Puritanism of nine-tenths of the English 
people, and on Puritanism he made war without mercy. No sooner 
had his elevation to the see of Canterbury placed him at the head of 
the EngHsh Church, than he turned the High Commission into a 
standing attack on the Puritan ministers. Rectors and vicars were 
scolded, suspended, deprived for "Gospel preaching." The use of 
the surplice, and the ceremonies most offensive to Puritan feeling, 
were enforced in every parish. The lectures founded in towns, which 
were the favourite posts of Puritan preachers, were rigorously sup- 
pressed. They found a refuge among the country gentlemen, and the 
Archbishop withdrew from the country gentlemen the privilege of 
keeping chaplains, which they had till then enjoyed. As parishes 
became vacant the High Church bishops filled them with men who 
denounced Calvinism, and declared passive obedience to the sovereign 
to be part of the law of God. The Puritans soon felt the stress of 
this process, and endeavoured to meet it by buying up the appropria- 
tions of livings, and securing through feeoffees a succession of Pro- 
testant ministers in the parishes of which they were patrons : but 
Laud cited the feeoffees into the Star Chamber, and roughly put 
an end to them. Nor was the persecution confined to the clergy. 
Under the two last reigns the small pocket-Bibles called the Geneva 
Bibles had become universally popular amongst English laymen ; 
but their marginal notes were found to savour of Calvinism, and 
their importation was prohibited. The habit of receiving the commu- 
nion in a sitting posture had become common, but kneeling was now 
enforced, and hundreds were excommunicated for refusing to comply 
with the injunction. A more galling means of annoyance was found 
in the different views of the two religious parties on the subject of 
Sunday. The Puritans identified the Lord's day with the Jewish 
Sabbath, and transferred to the one the strict observances which were 
required for the other. The Laudian clergy, on the other hand, regarded 
it simply as one among the holidays of the Church, and encouraged 
their flocks in the pastimes and recreations after service which had been 
common before the Reformation. The Crown under James had taken 
part with the High Churchmen, and had issued a "Book of Sports" 
which recommended certain games as lawful and desirable on the 
Lord's day. The Parliament, as might be expected, was stoutly on 
the other side, and had forbidden Sunday pastimes by statute. The 
general religious sense of the country was undoubtedly tending to a 



496 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



stricter observance of the day, when Laud brought the contest to a i 
sudden issue. He summoned the Chief-Justice, Richardson, who had 
enforced the statute in the w^estern shires, to the Council-table and 
rated him so violently that the old man came out complaining he had 
been all but choked iDy a pair of lawn sleeves. He then ordered everv 
minister to read the Royal declaration in favour of Sunday pastimes 
from the pulpit. One Puritan minis^sr had the wdt to obey, and to 
close the reading with the signifiy- it hint, "you have heard read, 
good people, both the commandment of God^- ^d the commandment 
of man ! Obey which you please." But the 'bulk refused to comply 
with the Archbishop's will. The result followed at which Laud no 
doubt had aimed. Hundreds of Puritan ministers were cited before 
the High Commission, and silenced or deprived. In the diocese of 
Norwich alone thirty parochial ministers were expelled from their 
cures. 

The suppression of Puritanism in the ranks of the clergy was onlv 
a preliminary to the real work on which the Archbishop's mind was 
set, the preparation for Catholic reunion by the elevation of the clergy 
to a Catholic standard in doctrine and ritual. Laud publicly avowed 
his preference of an unmarried to a married priesthood. Some of the 
bishops, and a large part of the new clergy who occupied the posts 
from which the Puritan ministers had been driven, advocated doctrines 
and customs which the Reformers had denounced as sheer Papistry ; 
the practice, for instance, of auricular confession, a real presence in 
the Sacrament, or prayers for the dead. One prelate, Montagu, was 
in heart a convert to Rome. Another, Goodman, died acknowledging 
himself a Papist. Meanwhile Laud was indefatigable in his efforts to 
raise the civil and political status of the clergy to the point which it had 
reached ere the fatal blow of the Reformation fell on the priest- 
hood. Among the archives of his see lies a large and costly volume 
in vellum, containing a copy of such records in the Tower as concerned 
the privileges of the clergy. Its compilation was entered in the 
Archbishop's diary as one among the "twenty-one things which I 
have projected to do if God bless me in them," and as among the 
fifteen to which before his fall he had been enabled to add his 
emphatic " done." The power of the Bishops' Courts, which had long 
fallen into decay, revived under his patronage. In 1636 he was able* 
to induce the King to raise a prelate, Juxon, Bishop of London, to the^' 
highest civil post in the realm, that of Lord High Treasurer. " No 
Churchman had it since Henry the Seventh's time," Laud comments , 
proudly. " I pray God bless him to carry it so that the Church may- 1 j| 
have honour, and the State service and content by it. And now, if 
the Church will not hold up themselves, under God I can do no more."" 
As he aimed at a higher standard of Catholicism in the clergy, so he 
aimed at a nearer approach to the pomp of Catholicism in public 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



497 



worship. His conduct in his own house at Lambeth brings out with sin- 
gular vividness the reckless courage with which he threw himself across 
the religious instincts of a time when the spiritual aspect of worship 
was overpowering in most men's minds its aesthetic and devotional 
sides. Men noted as a fatal omen the accident which marked his first 
entry into Lambeth ; for the overladen ferry-boat upset in the passage 
of the river, and though the horses and servants were saved, the 
Archbishop's coach remained .> the bottom of the Thames. But no 
omen, carefully as he might note it, brought a moment's hesitation 
to the bold, narrow mind of the new Primate. His first act, he 
boasted, was the setting about a restoration of his chapel ; and, as 
Laud managed it, his restoration was the simple undoing of all that 
had been done there by his predecessors since the Reformation. In 
Edward's time iconoclasm had dashed the stained glass from its 
windows, in Elizabeth's time the communion table had been moved 
into the middle of the chapel. It was probably Abbot who had 
abolished the organ and choir. Abbot, indeed, had put the finishing 
stroke on all attempts at a higher ceremonial. Neither he nor his 
household would bow at the name of Christ. The credence table had 
disappeared. Copes, still in use at the Communion in Parker's day, 
had ceased to be used in Laud's. Bare as its worship was, however, 
the chapel of Lambeth House was one of the most conspicuous among 
the ecclesiastical buildings of the time ; it had seen the daily worship 
of every Primate since Cranmer, and was a place " whither many of 
the nobility, judges, clergy, and persons of all sorts, as well strangers 
as natives, usually resorted." But to Laud its state seemed intolerable. 
With characteristic energy he aided with his own hands in the replace- 
ment of the painted glass in its windows, and racked his wits in 
piecing the fragments together. The glazier was scandalized by the 
Primate's express command to repair and set up again the " broken 
crucifix" in the east window. The holy table was removed from the 
centre, and set altarwise against the eastern wall, with a cloth of arras 
behind it, on which was embroidered the history of the Last Supper. 
The elaborate woodwork of the screen, the rich copes of the chaplain, 
the silver candlesticks, the credence table, the organ and the choir, 
the stately ritual, the bowings at the sacred name, the genuflexions to 
the altar, made the chapel at last such a model of worship as Laud 
desired. If he could not exact an equal pomp of devotion in other 
quarters, he exacted as much as he could. Bowing to the altar was 
introduced into all cathedral churches. A royal injunction ordered 
the removal of the communion table, which for the last half-century 
or more had in almost every parish church stood in the middle of the 
aisle, back to its pre-Reformation position in the chancel, and secured 
it from profanation by a rail. The removal implied, and was understood 
to imply, a recognition of the Real Presence, and a denial of the 

K K 



4QS 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



doctrine which Englishmen generally held about the Lord's Supper* 
But, strenuous as was the resistance Laud encountered, his pertinacity 
and severity warred it down. Vicars who denounced the change from 
their pulpits were fined, imprisoned, and deprived of their benefices. 
Churchwardens who refused or delayed to obey the injunction were 
rated at the Commission-table, and frightened into comphance. 

In their last Remonstrance to the King the Commons had denounced 
Laud as the chief assailant of the Protestant character of the Church of 
England; and every year of his Primacy showed him bent upon justify- 
ing the accusation. His policy was no longer the purely conservative 
policy of Parker or Whitgift ; it was aggressive and revolutionary. 
His '^ new counsels " threw whatever force there was in the feeling 
of conservatism into the hands of the Puritan, for it was the Puritan 
who now seemed to be defending the old character of the Church of 
England against its Primate's attacks. But backed as Laud was by the 
power of the Crown, the struggle became more hopeless every day. 
The Puritan saw his ministers silenced or deprived, his Sabbath pro- 
faned, the most sacred act of his worship brought near, as he fancied, 
to the Roman mass. Roman doctrine met him from the pulpit, 
Roman practices met him in the Church. We can hardly wonder* 
that with such a world around them " godly people in England began \ 
to apprehend a special hand of Providence in raising this plantation '" 
in Massachusetts ; " and their hearts were generally stirred to come 
over." It was in vain that weaker men returned to bring news of 
hardships and dangers, and told how two hundred of the new comers 
had perished with their first winter. A letter from Winthrop told how 
the rest toiled manfully on. " We nov/ enjoy God and Jesus Christ," he 
wrote to those at home, " and is not that enough ? I thank God I like 
so well to be here as I do not repent my coming. I would not have 
altered my course though I had foreseen all these afflictions. I never 
had more content of mind." With the strength and manliness of 
Puritanism, its bigotry and narrowness had crossed the Atlantic too. 
Roger Williams, a young minister who held the doctrine of freedom 
of conscience, was driven from the new settlement, to become a 
preacher among the settlers of Rhode Island. The bitter resentment 
stirred in the emigrants by persecution at home was seen in their 
abolition of Episcopacy and their prohibition of the use of the Book 
of Common Prayer. The intensity of its religious sentiments turned 
the colony into a theocracy. " To the end that the body of the 
Commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was ordered 
and agreed that for the time to come no man shall be admitted to the 
freedom of the body poUtic but such as are members of some of 
the churches within the bounds of the same." As Laud's hands 
grew heavier the number of Puritan emigrants rose fast. Three 
thousand new colonists arrived from England in a single year. The 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



499 



landing of Harry Vane, the son of a Secretary of State, and destined 
to play one of the firsi parts in the coming revolution, seemed to 
herald the coming of the very heads of the Puritan movement. The 
story that a royal embargo alone prevented Cromwell from crossing 
the seas is probably unfounded, but it is certain that nothing but the 
great change which followed on the Scotch rising prevented the flight 
of men of the highest rank. Lord Warwick secured the proprietor- 
ship of the Connecticut valley. Lord Saye and Sele and Lord 
Brooke began negotiations for transferring themselves to the New 
World. Hampdeli purchased a tract of land on the Narragansett. 
The growing stream of meaner emigrants marks the terrible pressure 
of the time. Between the saihng of Winthrop's expedition and the 
assembly of the Long Parliament, in the space, that is, of ten or 
eleven years, two hundred emigrant ships had crossed the Atlantic, 
and twenty thousand Englishmen had found a refuge in the West. 
Section V.— The Tyranny. 1629— 1640. 

\AiitJiorities. — For the general events of the time, see previous sections. 
The " Strafford Letters," and the Calendars of Domestic State Papers for this 
period, give its real history. '*Baillie's Letters" tell the story of the 
Scotch rising. Generally, Scotch affairs may be best studied in Mr. Burton's 
admirable " History of Scotland." Portraits of Weston, and most of the 
statesmen of this period, may be found in the earlier part of Clarendon's 
" History of the Rebellion."] 



At the opening of his Third Parliament Charles had hinted in 
ominous words that the continuance of Parliament at all depended on 
its compliance with his will. "If you do not your duty," said the 
King, "mine would then order me to use those other means which 
God has put into my hand." The threat, however, failed to break the 
resistance of the Commons, and the ominous words passed into a 
settled policy. "We have showed," said a Proclamation which 
followed on the dissolution of the Houses, " by our frequent meeting our 
people, our love to the use of Parliament ; yet, the late abuse having 
for the present driven us unwillingly out of that course, we shall account 
it presumption for any to prescribe any time unto us for Parliament.'' 

No Parliament in fact met for eleven years. But it would be 
imjust to charge the King at the outset of this period with any 
definite scheme of establishing a tyranny, or of changing what he 
conceived to be the older constitution of the realm. He " hated the 
very name of Parliaments," but in spite of his hate he had no settled 
purpose of abolishing them. His behef was that England would in 
time recover its senses, and that then Parliament might re-assemble 
without inconvenience to the Crown. In the interval, however long it 
might be, he proposed to govern single-handed by the use of ^^ those 

K K 2 



500 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



ll 



means which God had put into his hands." Resistance, indeed, he 
was resolved to put down. The leaders of the country party in the 
last Parliament were thrown into prison ; and Ehot died, the first 
martyr of English liberty, in the Tower. Men were forbidden to 
speak of the re-assembling of a Parliament. Laud was encouraged 
to break the obstinate opposition of the Puritans by the enforcement 
of religious uniformity. But here the King stopped. The opportunity 
which might have suggested dreams of organized despotism to a 
Richelieu, suggested only means of filling the Exchequer to Charles, 
He had in truth neither the grander nor the meaner instincts of the born 
tyrant. He did not seek to gain an absolute power over his people, 
because he believed that his absolute power Avas already a part of the 
constitution of the country. He set up no standing army to secure it, 
partly because he was poor, but yet more because his faith in his 
position was such that he never dreamt of any effectual resistance. 
His expedients for freeing the Crown from that dependence on 
Parliaments against which his pride as a sovereign revolted were 
simply peace and economy. To secure the first he sacrificed an 
opportunity greater than ever his father had trodden under foot. The 
fortunes of the great struggle in Germany were suddenly reversed at this 
juncture by the appearance of Gustavus Adolphus, with a Swedish army, 
in the heart of Germany. Tilly was defeated and slain ; the Catholic JL 
League humbled in the dust ; Munich, the capital of its Bavarian leader, f 
occupied by the Swedish arm}^, and the Lutheran princes of North 
Germany freed from the pressure of the Imperial soldiery ; while the . 
Emperor himself, trembling within the walls of Vienna, was driven to call A 
for aid from Wallenstein, an adventurer whose ambition he dreaded, but'j 
whose army could alone arrest the progress of the Protestant conqueror. 
The ruin that James had wrought was suddenly averted ; but the 
victories of Protestantism had no more power to draw Charles out of 
the petty circle of his politics at home than its defeats had had power 
to draw James out of the circle of his imbecile diplomacy. To 
support Gustavus by arms, or even by an imposing neutrality, meant a 
charge on the Royal Treasury which necessitated a fresh appeal to the 
Commons ; and this appeal Charles was resolved never to make. At 
the very crisis of the struggle therefore he patched up a hasty peace 
with both the two great Catholic powers of France and Spain, and 
fell back from any interference with the affairs of the Continent. His 
whole attention was absorbed by the pressing question of revenue. 
The debt was a large one ; and the ordinary income of the Crown, 
unaided by parliamentary supplies, was utterly inadequate to meet its 
ordinary expenditure. Charles was himself frugal and laborious ; 
^ and the administration of Weston, the new Lord Treasurer, whom he 
created Earl of Portland, contrasted advantageously with the waste 
and extravagance of the government under Buckingham. But economy 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



501 



failed to close the yawning gulf of the Treasury, and the course into 
which Charles was driven by the financial pressure showed with how 
wise a prescience the Commons had fixed on the point of arbitrary 
taxation as the chief danger to constitutional freedom. 

It is curious to see to what shifts the Royal pride was driven in its 

effort at once to fill the Exchequer, and yet to avoid, as far as it could, any 

direct breach of constitutional law in the imposition of taxes by the 

sole authority of the Crown.' The dormant powers of the prerogative 

were strained to their utmost. The right of the Crown to force 

knighthood on the landed gentry was revived, in order to squeeze 

them into composition for the refusal of it. Fines were levied on 

them for the redress of defects in their title-deeds. A Commission of 

the Forests exacted large sums from the neighbouring landowners for 

their encroachments on Crown lands. London, the special object of 

courtly dislike, on account of its stubborn Puritanism, was brought 

within the sweep of Royal extortion by the enforcement of an illegal 

proclamation which James had issued, prohibiting its extension. Every 

house throughout the large suburban districts in which the prohibition 

had been disregarded was only saved from demohtion by the payment of 

three years' rental to the Crown. The Treasury gained a hundred 

thousand pounds by this clever stroke, and Charles gained the bitter 

enmity of the great city whose strength and resources were fatal to 

him in the coming war. Though the Catholics were no longer troubled 

by any active persecution, and the Lord Treasurer was in heart a 

' Papist, the penury of the Exchequer forced the Crown to maintain 

the old system of fines for " recusancy." Vexatious measures of 

extortion such as these were far less hurtful to the State than the 

conversion of justice into a means of supplying the Royal necessities 

I by means of the Star Chamber. The jurisdiction of the King's 

' Council had been revived, as we have seen, by Wolsey as a check on 

i the nobles ; and it had received great development, especially on the 

side of criminal law, during the Tudor reigns. Forgery, perjury, riot, 

I maintenance, fraud, libel, and conspiracy, were the chief offences 

I cognizable in this Court, but its scope extended to every misdemeanor, 

i and especially to charges where, from the imperfection of the common 

law, or the power of offenders, justice was baffled in the lower Courts. 

Its process resembled that of Chancery : it usually acted on an informa- 

j tion laid before it by the King's Attorney. Both witnesses and accused 

I were examined on oath by special interrogatories, and the Court was 

' at liberty to adjudge any punishment short of death. The possession 

I of such a weapon would have been fatal to liberty under a great 

' tyrant ; under Charles it was turned simply to the profit of the 

Exchequer. Large numbers of cases which would ordinarily have 

come before the Courts of Common Law were called before the Star 

j Chamber, simply for the purpose of levying fines for the Crown. The 



502 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

The 
Tyranny. 
1629- 
1640. 



same motive accounts for the enormous penalties which were exacted 
for offences of a trivial character. The marriage of a gentleman with 
his niece was punished by the forfeiture of twelve thousand pounds, 
and fines of four and five thousand pounds were awarded for brawls 
between lords of the Court. Money for the fleet was procured by a 
stretch of the prerog3-tive which led afterwards to the great contest 
over ship-money. The legal research of Noy, one of the law officers 
of the Crown, found precedents among the records in the Tower for 
the provision of ships for the King's use by the port-towns of the 
kingdom, and for the furnishing of their equipment by the maritime 
counties. The precedents dated from times when no permanent fleet 
existed, and when sea warfare was waged by vessels lent for the 
moment by the various ports. But they were seized as a means of 
equipping a permanent navy without cost to the Exchequer ; and the 
writs which were issued to London and the chief English ports were 
enforced by fine and imprisonment. Shifts of this kind, however, did 
little to fill the Treasury, great as was the annoyance they caused, i 
Charles was driven from courses of doubtful legality to a more open w 
defiance of law. Monopohes, abandoned by Elizabeth, extinguished 
by Act of Parliament under James, and denounced with his own assent 
in the Petition of Right, were revived on a scale far more gigantic than 
had been seen before, the companies who undertook them paying a fixed 
duty on their profits as well as a large sum for the original concession 
cf the monopoly. Wine, soap, salt, and almost every article of 
domestic consumption fell into the hands of monopolists, and rose in 
price out of all proportion to the profit gained by the Crown. " They 
sup in our cup," Colepepper said afterwards in the Long Parliament, 
^'^ they dip in our dish, they sit by our fire ; we find them in the dye- 
fat, the wash bowls, and the powdering tub. They share with the cutler 
in his box. They have marked and sealed us from head to foot." Nothing, 
indeed, better marks the character of Charles than his conduct as to the 
Petition of Right. He had given his assent to it, he was fond of 
1 bidding Parliament rely on his " Royal word," but the thought of his 
pledge seems never to have troubled him for an instant. From thCj 
'.moment he began his career of government without a Parliamentj 
every one of the abuses he had promised to abolish, such as illei 
imprisonment, or tampering with the judges, was resorted to as 
matter of course. His penury, in spite of the financial expedients w( 
have described, drove him inevitably on to the fatal rock of illegal 
taxation. The exaction of Customs duties went on as of old at the 
ports. Writs were issued for the levy of "benevolences" from the 
shires. The resistance of the London merchants was roughly put 
down by the Star Chamber. Chambers, an alderman of London, who 
I complained bitterly that men were worse off in Turkey than in 
I England, was ruined by a fine of two thousand pounds, and died 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



broken-hearted in prison. The freeholders of the counties were more 
difficult to deal with. When those of Cornwall were called together 
at Bodmin to contribute to a voluntary loan, half the hundreds refused, 
and the yield of the rest came to little more than two thousand pounds. 
One of the Cornishmen has left an amusing record of the scene before 
the Commissioners appointed for assessment of the loan. " Some with 
great words and threat enings, some with persuasions," he says, " were 
drawn to it. I was like to have been complimented out of my money ; 
but knowing with whom I had to deal, I held, when I talked with them, 
my hands fast in my pockets." 

Vexatious indeed and illegal as were the proceedings of the Crown, 
there seems to have been little apprehension of any permanent danger 
to freedom in the country at large. To those who read the letters of 
the time there is something inexpressibly touching in the general faith of 
their writers in the ultimate victory of the Law. Charles was obstinate, 
but obstinacy was too common a foible amongst Englishmen to rouse 
any vehement resentment. The people were as stubborn as their King, 
and their political sense told them that the slightest disturbance of 
affairs must shake down the financial fabric which Charles was slowly 
building up, and force him back on subsidies and a Parliament. 
Meanwhile they would wait for better days, and their patience was 
aided by the general prosperity of the country. The long peace was 
producing its inevitable results in a vast extension of commerce and a 
rise of manufactures in the towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire. 
Fresh land was being brought into cultivation, and a great scheme was 
set on foot for reclaiming the Fens. The new wealth of the country 
gentry, through the increase of rent, was seen in the splendour of the 
houses which they were raising. The contrast of this peace and 
prosperity with the ruin and bloodshed of the Continent afforded a 
ready argument to the friends of the King's system. So tranquil was 
the outer appearance of the country that in Court circles all sense of 
danger had disappeared. " Some of the greatest statesmen and privy 
councillors," says May, "would ordinarily laugh when the word, 
^ liberty of the subject,' was named." There were courtiers bold enough 
to express their hope that ^'the King would never need any more 
Parliaments." But beneath this outer calm " the country ,'' Clarendon 
honestly tells us while eulogizing the Peace, "was full of pride and 
mutiny and discontent." Thousands, as we have seen, were quitting 
England for America. The gentry held aloof from the Court. " The 
common people in the generality and the country freeholders would 
rationally argue of their own rights and the oppressions which were 
laid upon them." If Charles was content to deceive himself, there was 
one man among his ministers who saw that the people were right in 
their policy of patience, and that unless other measures were taken 
the fabric of Royal despotism would fall at the first breath of adverse | 



504 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



fortune. Sir Thomas Wentworth, a great Yorkshire landowner and one 
of the representatives of his county in Parliament, had stood for years 
past among the more prominent members of the Country party in tht 
Commons. But from the first moment of his appearance in public his 
passionate desire had been to find employment in the service of the 
Crown. At the close of the preceding reign he was already connected 
with the Court, he had secured a seat in Yorkshire for one of the Royal 
ministers, and was believed to be on the high road to a peerage. Rut 
the consciousness of political ability which spurred his ambition 
roused the jealousy of Buckingham ; and the haughty pride of Went- 
worth was flung by repeated slights into an attitude of opposition, 
which his eloquence — grander in its sudden outbursts, though less 
earnest and sustained, than that of Eliot — soon rendered formidable. 
But his patriotism was still little more than hostility to the favourite, 
and his intrigues at Court roused Buckingham to crush, by a signal 
insult, the rival whose genius he instinctively dreaded. While sitting in 
his court as sheriff of Yorkshire, Wentworth received the announcement 
of his dismissal from office, and of the gift of his post to Sir John Savile, 
his rival in the county. " Since they will thus weakly breathe on me a 
seeming disgrace in the public face of my country," he said with a 
characteristic outburst of contemptuous pride, " I shall crave leave to 
wipe it away as openly, as easily ! " He sprang at once to the front of \ 
the Commons in urging the Petition of Right. Whether in that crisis 
of Wentworth's life some nobler impulse, some true passion for the 
freedom he was to betray mingled with his thirst for revenge, it is hard 
to tell. But his words were words of fire. ^* If he did not faithfully 
insist for the common liberty of the subject to be preserved whole and 
entire," it was thus he closed one of his speeches on the Petition, " it 
was his desire that he might be set as a beacon on a hill for all men 
else to wonder at." 

It is as such a beacon that his name has stood from that time to this 
The death of Buckingham had no sooner removed the obstacle that 
stood between his ambition and the end at which it had aimed through- 
out, than the cloak of patriotism was flung by. Wentworth was ad- 
mitted to the Royal Council, and as he took his seat at the board he 
promised to " vindicate the Monarchy for ever from the conditions 
and restraints of subjects." So great was the faith in his zeal and 
power which he knew how to breathe into his Royal master, that 
he was at once raised to the peerage, and rewarded v/ith the high post 
of Lord President of the North. Charles had good ground for this 
rapid confidence in his new minister. In Wentworth, or as we may 
call him from the title he assumed at the close of his life, in the 
Earl of Strafford, the very genius of tyranny was embodied. He 
I was far too clear-sighted to share his master's behef that the arbitrary 
I power which Charles was wielding formed any part of the old con- 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



SOS 



stitution of the country, or to believe that the mere lapse of time 
would so change the temper of Englishmen as to reconcile them 
to despotism. He knew that absolute rule was a new thing in England, 
and that the only way of permanently establishing it was not by 
reasoning, or by the force of custom, but by the force of fear. His 
system was the expression of his own inner temper ; and the dark 
gloomy countenance, the full heavy eye, which meet us in Strafford's 
portrait are the best commentary on his policy of " Thorough." It was 
by the sheer strength of his genius, by the terror his violence inspired 
amid the meaner men whom Buckingham had left, by the general 
sense of his power, that he had forced himself upon the Court. He 
had none of the small arts of a courtier. His air was that of a silent, 
proud, passionate man ; when he first appeared at Whitehall his rough 
uncourtly manners provoked a smile in the Royal circle, but the smile 
soon died into a general hate. The Queen, frivolous and meddlesome 
as she was, detested him ; his fellow-ministers intrigued against him, 
and seized on his hot speeches against the great lords, his quarrels 
with the Royal household, his transports of passion at the very Council- ' 
table, to ruin him in his master's favour. The King himself, while 
steadily supporting him against his rivals, was utterly unable to under- 
stand his drift. Charles valued him as an administrator, disdainful 
of private ends, crushing great and small with the same haughty 
indifference to men's love or hate, and devoted to the one aim of 
building up the power of the Crown. But in his purpose of preparing 
for the great struggle with freedom which he saw before him, of building- 
up by force such a despotism in England as Richelieu was building up 
in France, and of thus making England as great in Europe as France 
had been made by Richelieu, he could look for little sympathy and less 
help from the King. 

Wentworth's genius turned impatiently to a sphere where it could act 
alone, untrammelled by the hindrances it encountered at home. His 
purpose was to prepare for the coming contest by the provision of a 
fixed revenue, arsenals, fortresses, and a standing anny, and it was in 
Ireland that he resolved to find them. He saw in the miserable 
country which had hitherto been a drain upon the resources of the 
Crown the lever he needed for the overthrow of Enghsh freedom. It 
was easy by the balance of Catholic against Protestant to make both 
parties dependent on the Royal authority ; the rights of conquest, 
which in Strafford's theory vested the whole land in the absolute 
possession of the Crown, gave him a large field for his administrative 
abihty ; and for the rest he trusted, and trusted justly, to the force of 
his genius and of his will. In a few years after his appointment as 
Lord Lieutenant, his aim seemed all but realized. "The King," he 
wrote to Laud, " is as absolute here as any prince in the world can be." 
Wentworth's government indeed was a mere rule of terror. Archbishop 



Sec. V. 

The 

TyrannYv 

1629- 

1640. 



Went- 
T^orth in 
Ireland. 



it>33. 



5o6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. Usher, with almost every name which we can respect in the island, was 
ij^ ; the object of his insult and oppression. His tyranny strode over all legal 
bounds. A few insolent words, construed as mutiny, were enough to 
bring Lord Mountnorris before a council of war, and to inflict on him a 
sentence of death. In one instance Wentworth stooped to use his power 
for the basest personal ends : an adulterous passion for the Chancellor's 
daughter-in-law led him to order that peer to settle his estate in her 
favour, and, on his refusal, to deprive him of office. But such instances 
were rare. His tyranny aimed at public ends, and in Ireland the 
heavy hand of a single despot delivered the mass of the people at any 
rate from the local despotism of a hundred masters. The Irish land- 
owners were for the first time made to feel themselves amenable to the 
law. Justice was enforced, outrage was repressed, the condition of 
the clergy was to some extent raised, the sea was cleared of the pirates 
who infested it. The foundation of the linen manufacture which was 
to bring wealth to Ulster, and the first development of Irish commerce, 
date from the Lieutenancy of Wentworth. But good government was 
only a means with him for further ends. The noblest work to be done 
in Ireland was the bringing about a reconciliation between Catholic 
and Protestant, and an obliteration of the anger and thirst for ven- 
geance which had been raised by the Ulster Plantation. Strafford, 
on the other hand, angered the Protestants by a toleration of Catholic 
worship and a suspension of the persecution which had feebly beguile 
against the priesthood, while he fed the irritation of the Catholics b}J 
schemes for a Plantation of Connaught. His whole aim was to en- 
courage a disunion which left both parties dependent for support and 
protection on the Crown. It was a policy which was to end in bringing 
about the horrors of the Irish Massacre, the vengeance of Cromwell, 
and the long series of atrocities on both sides which make the story of 
the country he mined so terrible to tell. But for the hour it left Ireland 
helpless in his hands. He had doubled the revenue. He had raised an 
army. He felt himself strong enough at last, in spite of the panic with 
which Charles heard his project, to summon an Irish Parliament. His 
aim was to read a lesson to England and the King, by showing how 
completely that dreaded thing, a Parliament, could be made the organ 
of the Royal will ; and his success was complete. Two-thirds, indeed, 
of an Irish House of Commons consisted of the representatives of 
wretched villages, the pocket-boroughs of the Crown ; while absent 
peers were forced to send in their proxies to the Council to be used at 
its pleasure. But precautions were hardly needed. The two Houses 
trembled at the stern master who bade their members not let the King 
" find them muttering, or, to speak it more truly, mutinying in corners,''^ 
and voted with a perfect docility the means of maintaining an army of 
five thousand foot and five hundred horse. Even had the subsidy been 
I refused, the result would have been the same. " I would undertake," 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



507 



The 

Tyranny. 

1629- 

I640. 

Scotland 
and tlie 



wrote Strafford, " upon the peril of my head, to make the King's army 
able to subsist and to provide for itself among them without their help." 

While Strafford was thus working out his system of " Thorough " 
on one side of St. George's Channel, it was being carried out on the 
other by a mind inferior, indeed, to his own in genius, but almost 
equal to it in courage and tenacity. On the death of Weston, Laud ^^^^ ^^^ 
became virtually first minister of the Crown at the English Council- Stuarts 
board. We have already seen with what a reckless and unscrupulous 
activity he was crushing Puritanism in the English Church, and 
driving Puritan ministers from English pulpits ; and in this work his 
new position enabled him to back the authority of the High Commis- 
sion by the terrors of the Star Chamber. It was a work, indeed, 
which to Laud's mind v/as at once civil and religious : he had allied 
the cause of ecclesiastical dogmatism with that of absolutism in the 
State ; and, while borrowing the power of the Crown to crush ecclesi- 
astical liberty, he brought the influence of the Church to bear on the 
ruin of civil freedom. But his power stopped at the Scotch frontier. 
Across the Border stood a Church without a bishop, without a ritual, 
modelled on the doctrine and system of Geneva, Calvinist in teaching 
and in government. The mere existence of such a Church gave coun- 
tenance to English Puritanism, and threatened in any hour of eccle- 
siastical weakness to bring a Presbyterian influence to bear on the 
Church of England. With Scotland, indeed, Laud could only deal 
indirectly through Charles, for the King was jealous of any interference 
of his English ministers or Parliament with his Northern Kingdom. 
But Charles was himself earnest to deal with it. He had imbibed 
his father's hatred of the Presbyterian system, and from the outset of 
his reign he had been making advance after advance towards the re- 
establishment of Episcopacy. To understand, however, what had been 
done, and the relations which had by this time grown up between 
Scotland and its King, we must take up again the brief thread of its 
history which we broke at the moment when Mary fled for refuge 
over the English border. 

After a few years of wise and able rule, the triumph of Protestantism 
under the Earl of Murray had been interrupted by his assassination, 
by the revival of the Queen's faction, and by the renewal of civil war. 
The reaction, however, was a brief one, and the general horror excited 
by the Massacre of St. Bartholomew completed the ruin of the 
Catholic cause. Edinburgh, the last fortress held in Mary's name, 
surrendered to an English force sent by Elizabeth ; and its captain, the 
chivalrous Kirkcaldy of Grange, was hung for treason at the market- 
cross. The people of the Lowlands, indeed, were now stanch for the 
new faith ; and the Protestant Church rose rapidly after the death of 
Knox into a power which appealed at every critical juncture to the 
deeper feelings of the nation at large. In the battle with Catholicism 



5o8 



HISTORY OB THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the bishops had clung to the old religion ; and the new faith, left 
without episcopal interference, and influenced by the Genevan training 
of Knox, borrowed from Calvin its model of Church government, as it 
borrowed its theology. The system of Presbyterianism, as it grew up 
at the outset without direct recognition from the law, bound Scotland 
together by its administrative organization, its church synods and 
general assemblies, while it called the people at large, by the power it 
conferred upon the lay elders in each congregation, to a voice, and, as it 
proved, a decisive voice, in the administration of affairs. Its govern- 
ment by ministers gave it the look of an ecclesiastical despotism, but 
no Church constitution has proved in practice so democratic as that of 
Scotland. Its influence in raising the nation at large to a consciousness 
of its own power is shown by the change which passes, from the 
moment of its final establishment, over the face of Scotch history. 
The country ceases to belong to the great nobles, who had turned it 
into their battle ground ever since the death of Bruce. After the 
death of the Earl of Morton, who had put an end to the civil war, and 
ruled the country for five years with a wise and steady hand, the 
possession of the young sovereign, James the Sixth, was disputed indeed 
hy one noble and another ; but the power of the Church was felt more 
and more over nobles and King. Melville, who had succeeded to- 
much of Knox's authority, claimed for the ecclesiastical body an 
independence of the State which James hardly dared to resent ; while 
he writhed helplessly beneath the sway which public opinion, expressed 
through the General Assembly of the Church, exercised over the civil 
government. In the great crisis of the Armada his hands were fettered 
by the league with England which it forced upon him. The democratic 
boldness of Calvinism allied itself with the spiritual pride of the Presby- 
terian ministers in their dealings with the Crown. Melville in open 
Council took James by the sleeve, and called him " God's silly vassal! " 
" There are two Kings,'^ he told him, when James extolled his Royal 
authority, " and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus the 
King, and His Kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King James the 
Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but 
a member." The v/ords and tone of the great preacher were bitterly 
remembered when James mounted the English throne. "A Scottish 
Presbytery," he said at the Hampton Court Conference, "as well 
fitteth with Monarchy as God and the Devil ! No Bishop, no King ! " 
But Scotland was resolved on "no bishop." Episcopacy had become 
identified among the more zealous Scotchmen with the old Catholicism 
they had shaken off. When he appeared at a later time before the 
English Council-table, Melville took the Archbishop of Canterbury by 
the sleeves of his rochet, and, shaking them in his manner, called 
them Romish rags, and the mark of the Beast, f Four years, therefore, 
after the ruin of the Armada, Episcopacy was formally aboHshed, and 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



509 



the Presbyterian system estajDlished by law as the mode of government 
of the Church of Scotland. ] The rule of the Church was placed in a 
General Assembly, with subordinate Provincial Synods, Presbyteries, 
and Kirk Sessions, by which its discipline was carried down to every 
member of a congregation. As yet, however, the authority of the 
Assembly was hardly felt north of the Tay, while the system of Pres- 
bytery had by no means won the hold it afterwards gained over the 
people, even to the south of that river ; and James had no sooner 
succeeded to the English throne than he used his new power in a 
struggle to undo the work which had been done. Melville, after his 
scornful protest at the Council-table, was banished from Scotland, and 
died in exile at Sedan. The old sees were restored, and three of the 
new bishops were consecrated in England, and returned to communi- 
cate the gift of Apostolical succession to their colleagues. But Epis- 
copacy remained simply a name. The Presbyterian organization 
remained untouched in doctrine or disciphne. All that James could do 
was to set his prelates to preside as permanent moderators in the pro- 
vincial synods, and to prevent the Assembly from meeting without a 
summons from the Crown. The struggle, however, went on throughout 
his reign with varying success. An attempt to vest the government of 
the Church in the King and Bishops was foiled by the protest of the 
Presbyterian party ; but a General Assembly, gathered at Perth, was 
induced to adopt some of the ecclesiastical practices most distasteful 
to them. The earlier policy of Charles, though it followed his father's 
line of action, effected little save a partial restoration of Church-lands, 
which the lords were forced to surrender. But Laud had no sooner 
become minister than his vigorous action made itself felt. The King's 
first acts were directed rather to points of outer observance than to 
any attack on the actual fabric of Presbyterian organization. The 
Estates were induced to withdraw the control of ecclesiastical apparel 
from the Assembly, and to commit it to the Crown ; a step soon 
followed by a resumption of their episcopal costume on the part of the 
Scotch bishops. When the Bishop of Moray preached before Charles 
in his rochet, on the King's visit to Edinburgh, it was the first instance 
of its use since the Reformation. The innovation was followed by the 
issue of a Royal warrant which directed all ministers to use the surplice 
in divine worship. From costume, however, the busy minister soon 
passed to weightier matters. Many years had gone by since he had 
vainly invited James to draw his Scotch "subjects to a nearer conjunc- 
tion with the liturgy and canons of this nation." " I sent him back 
again," said the shrewd old King, "with the frivolous draft he had 
drawn. For all that, he feared not my anger, but assaulted me again 
with another ill-fangled platform to make that stubborn Kirk stoop 
more to the English platform, but I durst not play fast and loose with 
my word. He knows not the stomach of that people.'' But Laud 



5IO 



HIS70RY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chaf. 



Sec. V. 

The 

Tyranny. 

164.0. 

1636. 



Miltois^S 

Early 
Poems. 



had known how to wait, and his time had come at last. A neiv 
diocese, that of Edinburgh, was created, and the Archbishop of St* 
Andrews was named chancellor of 'the realm. A book of Canons^ 
issued by the sole authority of the King, ignored Assembly and Kirk 
Session, and practically abolished the whole Presbyterian system. 
As daring a stretch of the prerogative superseded what was known as 
Knox's Liturgy — the book of Common Order drawn up on the Genevan 
model by that Reformer, and generally used throughout Scotland — by 
a new Liturgy based on the EngUsh Book of Common Prayer. The 
Liturgy and Canons had been Laud's own handiwork ; in their com- 
position the General Assembly had neither been consulted nor recog- 
nized, and to enforce them on Scotland was to effect an ecclesiastical 
revolution of the most serious kind. The books, however, were backed 
by a Royal Injunction, and Laud flattered himself that the revolution 
had been wrought. 

Triumphant in Scotland, with Scotch Presbyterianism — as he 
fancied — at his feet. Laud's hand fell heavier than ever on the 
English Puritans. There were signs of a change of temper which 
might have made even a bolder man pause. Thousands, as we have 
seen, of "the best" scholars, merchants, lawyers, farmers, weie 
flying over the Atlantic to seek freedom and purity of religion 
in the wilderness. Great landowners and nobles were preparing to 
follow. Hundreds of ministers had quitted their parsonages rather 
than abet the Royal insult to the sanctity of the Sabbath. The 
Puritans who remained among the clergy were giving up their homes 
rather than consent to the change of the Sacred table into an altar, 
or to silence in their protests against the new Popery. The noblest 
of living Englishmen refused to become the priest of a Church whose 
ministry could only be "bought with servitude and forspeaking." 
We have seen John Milton leave Cambridge, self-dedicated " to that 
same lot, however mean or high, to which time leads me and the 
will of Heaven." But the lot to which these called him was not 
the ministerial office to which he had been destined from his childhood. 
In later life he told bitterly the story, how he had been " Church-outed 
by the prelates." " Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving 
what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take 
orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he 
took with a conscience that would retch he must either straight 
perjure or split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence 
before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude 
and forswearing." In spite therefore of his father's regrets, he retired 
to a new home which the scrivener had found at Horton, a village in ; 
the neighbourhood of Windsor, and quietly "busied himself with study 
and poetry. The poetic impulse of the Renascence had been slowly ; 
dying away under the Stuarts. The stage was falling into mere coarse- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



S" 



ness and horror ; Shakspere had died quietly at Stratford in Milton's ; 
childhood ; the last and worst play of Ben Jonson appeared in the year 
of his settlement at Horton ; and though Ford and Massinger still 
lino-ered on there were no successors for them but Shirley and 
Davenant. The philosophic and meditative taste of the age had pro- 
duced indeed poetic schools of its own : poetic satire had become 
fashionable in Hall, better known afterwards as a bishop, and had 
been carried on vigorously by George Wither ; the so-called " meta- 
physical" poetry, the vigorous and pithy expression of a cold and 
prosaic good sense began with Sir John Davies, and buried itself in 
fantastic affectations in Donne ; religious verse had become popular j 
in the o-loomy allegories of Ouarles and the tender refinement which ; 
struo-gles through a jmigle of puns and extravagances in George I 
Herbert. But what poetic life really remained was to be found 
only in the caressing fancy and lively badinage of lyric singers like 
Herrick, whose grace is untouched by passion and often disfigured by 
coarseness, and pedantry ; or in the school of Spenser's more direct 
successors where Brown, in his pastorals, and the two Fletchers, 
Phineas and Giles, in their unreadable allegories, still preserved some- 
thing of their master's sweetness, if they preserved nothing of his 
power. Milton was himself a Spenserian ; he owned to Dryden in 
later years that " Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest 
lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on " the sage and solemn tunes " of 
the " Faerie Queen," its " forests and enchantments drear^ where more 
is meant than meets the ear." But of the weakness and affectation 
which characterized Spenser's successors he had not a trace. In the 
" Allegro " and " Penseroso," the first results of his retirement at 
Horton, we catch again the fancy and melody of the Elizabethan 
verse, the wealth of its imagery, its wide sympathy with nature and 
man. There is a loss, perhaps, of the older freedom and spontaneity of 
the Renascence, a rhetorical rather than passionate turn in the young 
poet, a striking absence of dramatic power, and a want of precision and 
exactness even in his picturesque touches. Milton's imagination is not 
strong enough to identify him with the world which he imagines ; he 
stands apart from it, and looks at it as from a distance, ordering it 
and arranging it at his will. But if in this respect he falls, both in his 
earlier and later poems, far below Shakspere or Spenser, the deficiency 
is all but com.pensated by his nobleness of feeling and expression, 
the severity of his taste, his sustained dignity, and the perfectness and ! 
completeness of his work. The moral grandeur of the Puritan breathes, ' 
even in these lighter pieces of his youth, through every line. The : 
" Comus," planned as a masque for the festivities which the Earl of i 
Bridgewater was holding at Ludlow Castle, rises into an almost im- 1 
passioned pleading for the love of virtue. ! 

The historic interest of Milton's ^^ Comus," lies in its forming part of j 



Sec. v. 



512 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Hampden 

and 

Ship. 

money. 



a protest made by the more cultured Puritans at this time against the 
gloomier bigotry which persecution was fostering in the party at large. 
The patience of Englishmen, in fact, was slowly wearing out. There 
was a sudden upgrowth of virulent pamphlets of the old Martin Mar- 
prelate type. Men, whose names no one asked, hawked libels, whose 
authorship no one knew, from the door of the tradesman to the door of 
the squire. As the hopes of a Parhament grew fainter, and men de- 
spaired of any legal remedy, violent and weak-headed fanatics came, as 
at such times they always come, to the front. Leighton, the father of 
the saintly Archbishop of that name, had given a specimen of their tone 
at the outset of this period, by denouncing the prelates as men of blood, 
Episcopacy as Antichrist, and the Popish queen as a daughter of Heth. 
The " Histrio-mastrix" of Prynne, a lawyer distinguished for his consti- 
tutional knowledge, but the most obstinate and narrow-minded of men, 
marked the deepening of Puritan bigotry under the fostering warmth of 
Laud^s persecution. The book was an attack on players as the minis- 
ters of Satan, on theatres as the Devil's chapels, on hunting, maypoles, 
the decking of houses at Christmas with evergreens, on cards, music, 
and false hair. ^The attack on the stage was as offensive to Uie more 
cultured minds among the Puritan party as to the Court itself | Selden 
and Whitelock took a prominent part in preparing the grand masque by 
which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the fol- 
lowing year Milton wrote his masque of " Comus," for Ludlow Castle. 
To leave Prynne, however, simply to the censure of wiser men than him- 
self was too sensible a course for the angry Primate. No man was ever 
sent to prison before or since for such a sheer mass of nonsense ; but 
the prison with which Laud rewarded Prynne's enormous foho tamed 
his spirit so little that a new tract written within its walls attacked the 
bishops as devouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. A fellow-prisoner, 
John Bastwick, declared in his "Litany" that "Hell was broke loose, 
and the Devils in surplices, hoods, copes, and rochets, were come 
among us." Burton, a London clergyman silenced by the High Com- 
mission, called on all Christians to resist the bishops as " robbers of 
souls, limbs of the Beast, and factors of Antichrist." Raving of 
this sort, however, though it showed how fast the storm of popular 
passion was gathering, was not so pressing a difficulty to the Royal 
ministers at this time as the old difficulty of the Exchequer. The 
ingenious devices of the Court lawyers, the revived prerogatives, the 
illegal customs, the fines and confiscations which were alienating 
one class after another and sowing in home after home the seeds 
of a bitter hatred to the Crown, had failed to recruit the Treasury. 
In spite of the severe economy of Charles and his ministers newi 
exactions were necessary, at a time when the rising discontent 
made every new exaction a challenge to revolt. But danger and 
difficulty were lost on the temper of the two men who really governed^ 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



England. /To Laud and Strafford, indeed, the King seemed over- p 
cautious, the Star Chamber feeble, the Judges over-scrupulous, j! 
'' I am for Thorough," the one writes to the other in alternate fits f 
of impatience at the slow progress they are making. Strafford | 
was anxious that his good work might not " be spoiled on that ] 
side." Laud echoed the wish, while he envied the free course of the j 
Lord Lieutenant. " You have a good deal of humour here," he writes, | 
"for your proceeding. Go on a^ God's name. I have done with; 
expecting of Thorough on this side." The financial pressure was | 
seized by both to force the King on to a bolder course. " The debt of | 
the Crown being taken off," Strafford urged, " you may govern at your ; 
will." All pretence of precedents was thrown aside, and Laud resolved j 
to find a permanent revenue in the conversion of the " ship-money 
levied on ports and the maritime counties into a general tax irnposM" 
by the Royal will upon the whole country. The sum expected from 
the tax was no less than a quarter of a million a year. ** I know no 
reason," Strafford had written significantly, " but you may as well rule 
the common lawyers in England as I, poor beagle, do here ;" and a 
bench of Judges, remodelled on his hint for the occasion, no 
sooner declared the new impost to be legal than he drew the logical 
deduction from their decision. " Since it is lawful for the King to 
impose a tax for the equipment of the navy, it must be equally so for 
the levy of an army : and the same reason which authorizes him to 
levy an army to resist, will authorize him to carry that army abroad 
-that he may prevent invasion. Moreover what is law in England is law 
also in Scotland and Ireland. The decision of the judges will there- 
fore make the King absolute at home and formidable abroad. Let him 
only abstain from war for a few years that he may habituate his 
subjects to the payment of that tax, and in the end he will find 
himself more powerful and respected than any of his predecessors.'^ 
But there were men who saw the danger to freedom in this levy of 
ship-money as clearly as Strafford himself. J Qhn_ Hampden, a friend 
of Eliot's, a man of consummate ability, of unequalled power of persua- 
sion, of a keen intelligence, ripe learning, and a character singularly 
pure and loveable, had already shown the firmness of his temper in 
his refusal to contribute to the forced loan of 1626. He now repeated 
his refusal, declared ship-money an illegal impost, and resolved to 
rouse the spirit of the country by an appeal for protection to the lav/. 

The news of Hampden's resistance thrilled through England at the 
very moment when men were roused by the news of resistance in the 
north. The submission with which Scotl^and had bent to aggression 
after aggression found an end at last. The Dean of Edinburgh had 
no sooner opened the new Prayer Book than a murm.ur ran through 
the congregation, and a stool hurled from among the crowd felled him 
to the ground. The Church was cleared, the service read, but the 

L L 



513 



Sec. V. 

Thb 

Tyrannv. 

1629- 

1640. 



The 

Hesist- 

ance. 



July, 1037 



5M 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



rising discontent frightened the judges into a decision that the Royal 
writ enjoined the purchase, and not the use, of the Prayer Book. Its use 
was at once discontinued, and the angry orders which came from 
England for its restoration were met by a shower of protests from 
every part of Scotland. The Duke of Lennox alone took sixty-eight 
petitions with him to the Court ; while ministers, nobles, and gentry 
poured into Edinburgh to organize the national resistance. The effect 
of these events in Scotland was at once seen in the open demonstra- 
tion of discontent south of the border. Prynne and his fellow 
pamphleteers, when Laud dragged them before the Star Chamber as 
'* trumpets of sedition," listened with defiance to their sentence of 
I exposure in the pillory and imprisonment for life ; and the crowd who 
filled Palace Yard to witness their punishment groaned at the cutting off 
of their ears, and " gave a great shout " when Prynne urged that the 
sentence on him was contrary to the law. A hundred thousand 
Londoners lined the road as they passed on the way to prison ; and the 
journey of these " Martyrs," as the spectators called themx, was like a 
triumphal progress. Startled as he was at the sudden burst of 
popular feeling, Laud was dauntless as ever; and Prynne's entertainers, 
as he passed through the country, were summoned before the Star 
Chamber, while the censorship struck fiercer blows at the Puritan 
press. But the real danger lay not in the libels of silly zealots but in 
the attitude of Scotland, and in the effect which was being produced in 
England at large By the trial of Hampden. For twelve days the 
cause of ship-money was solemnly argued before the full bench of 
Judges. It was proved that the tax in past times had been levied only 
in cases of sudden emergency, and confined to the coast and port towns 
alone, and that even the show of legality had been taken from it by 
formal Statute and by the Petition of Right. The case was adjourned, 
I but the discussion told not merely on England but on the temper of 
I the Scots. Charles had repKed to their petitions by a simple order 
I to all strangers to leave the capital. But the Council was unable to 
I enforce his order ; and the nobles and gentry before dispersing to their 
homes named a body of delegates, under the odd title of " the Tables," 
who carried on through the winter a series of negotiations with the 
j Crown. The negotiations were interrupted in the following spring by £ 
! renewed order for their dispersion, and for the acceptance of a Prayer 
Book ; while the judges in England delivered at last their long-delayed 
decision on Hampden's case. All save two laid down the broad 
principle that no Statute prohibiting arbitrary taxation could be 
pleaded against the Kings will. " I never read or heard," said Judge 
Berkley, " that lex was rex, but it is common and most true that rex is 
lex." Finch, the Chief-Justice, summed up the opinions of his 
fellow judges. "Acts of Parliament to take away the King's Royal 
power in the defence of his kingdom are void," he said : " they are 



VIII.l 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



5^5 



void Acts of Parliament to bind the King not to command the 
subjects, their persons, and goods, and I say their money too, for no 
Acts of Parliament made any difference." 

" I wish Mr. Hampden and others to his hkeness," the Lord Lieu- 
tenant wrote bitterly from Ireland, ^^ were well whipt into their right 
senses.'' Amidst the exultation of the Court over the decision of the 
judges. Went worth saw clearly that Hampden's work had been done. 
His resistance had roused England to a sense of the danger to her 
freedom, and forced into light the real character of the Royal claims. , 
How stern and bitter the temper even of the noblest Puritans had 
become at last v/e see in the poem which Milton produced at this 
time, his elegy of ^* Lycidas." Its grave and tender lament is broken 
by a sudden flash of indignation at the dangers around the Church, 
at the " blind mouths that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheep- 
hook," and to whom "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed," 
while ^^ the grim wolf" of Rome 'Svith privy paw daily devours apace, 
and nothing said ! " The stern resolve of the people to demand 
justice on their tyrants spoke in his threat of the axe. Strafford and 
Laud, and Charles himself, had yet to reckon with " that two-handed 
engine at the door " which stood " ready to smite once, and smite 
no more." But stern as was the general resolve, there was no need for 
immediate action, for the difflculties which were gathering in the north 
were certain to bring a strain on the Government which would force 
it to seek support from the people. The King's demand for immediate 
submission, which reached Edinburgh with the significant comment 
of the Hampden judgment, at once gathered the whole body of re- 
monstrants together round " the Tables " at Stirling ; and a pro 
testation, read at Edinburgh, was followed, on Archibald Johnston 
of Warriston's suggestion, by the renewal of the Covenant with God 
which had been drawn up and sworn to in a previous hour of peril, 
vs^hen Mary was still plotting against Protestantism, and Spain was 
preparing its Armada. " We promise and swear," ran the solemn en- 
gagement at its close, " by the great name of the Lord our God, to 
continue in the profession and obedience of the said Religion, and that 
we shall defend the same, and resist all their contrary errors and 
1 corruptions, according to our vocation and the utm.ost of that power 
which God has put into our hands all the days of our life." The 
Covenant was signed in the churchyard of the Grey Friars at Edin- 
burgh, in a tumult of enthusiasm, " with such content and joy as those 
who, having long before been outlaws and rebels, are admitted again 
into covenant with God." Gentlemen and nobles rode with the docu- 
ments in their pockets over the country, gathering subscriptions to it, 
while the ministers pressed for a general consent to it from the pulpit. 
But pressure was needless. "Such was the zeal of subscribers that 
for a while many subscribed with tears on their cheeks ; " some were 

I. L 2 



5i& 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



indeed reputed to have " drawn their own blood and used it in place of 
ink to underwrite their names/' The force given to Scottish free- 
dom by this revival of rehgious fervour was seen in the new tone 
adopted by the Covenanters. The Marquis of Hamilton, who had 
come as Royal Commissioner to put an end to the quarrel, was at once 
met by demands for an abolition of the Court of High Commission, 
the withdrawal of the Books of Canons and Common Prayer, a free 
Parliament, and a free General Assembly. It was in vain that he 
threatened war ; even the Council pressed Charles to give fuller satis- 
faction to the people. " I will rather die," the King wrote to Hamilton, 
" than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands ; " but it was 
needful to gain time. " The discontents at home,'' wrote Lord North- 
umberland to Strafford, " do rather increase than lessen :" and Charles 
was without money or men. Ht was in vain that he begged for a loan 
from Spain on promise of declaring war against Holland, or that he 
tried to procure ten thousand troops from Flanders who might be useful 
in England after their victory over Scottish freedom. "The loan and 
troops were both refused, and the contributions offered by the English 
Catholics did little to recruit the Exchequer^ > Charles had directed the 
Marquis to delay any decisive breach till the Royal fleet appeared in the 
Forth ; but it was hard to equip a fleet at all. Scotland indeed was sooner 
ready for war than the King. The volunteers who had been servdng 
in the Thirty Years' War streamed home at the call of their brethren. 
General Leslie, a veteran trained under Gustavus, came from Sweden 
to take the command of the new forces. A voluntary war tax was levied 
in every shire. The danger at last forced the King to yield to the 
Scotch demands ; but he had no sooner yielded than the concession 
was withdrawn, and the Assembly hardly met before it was called upon 
to disperse. The order however was disregarded till it had abolished 
the innovations in worship and discipline, deposed the bishops, and for- 
mally set the Presbyterian Church courts up again. The news that 
Charles was gathering an army at York, and reckoning for support 
on the clans of the north, was answered by the seizure of Edinburgh, 
Dumbarton, and Stirling ; while ten thousand well-equipped troops 
under Leslie and the Earl of Montrose seized Aberdeen, and brought 
the Catholic Earl of Huntly a prisoner to the south. Instead of over- 
awing the country, the appearance of the Royal fleet in the Forth was 
the signal for Leslie's march on the Border. Charles had hardly 
pushed across the Tweed, when the " old Httle crooked soldier," en- 
camping on the hill of Dunse Law, fairly offered him battle. 

Charles however was not strong enough to fight, and the two armies] 
returned home on his consent to the gathering of a free Assembly and 
Parliament. But the pacification at Berwick was a mere suspension 
of arms ; the King's summons of Wentworth, now created Earl of 
' Strafford, from Ireland was a proof that violent measures were in 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



5''7 



preparation, and the Scots met the challenge by demands for the 
convocation of ti'iennial Parliaments, for freedom of elections and 
of debate. Strafford counselled that they should be whipped back 
into their senses ; and the discovery of a correspondence which was 
being carried on between some of the Covenanter leaders and 
the French Court raised hopes in the King that an appeal to the 
country for aid against " Scotch treason '' would still find an answer 
in English loyalty. While Strafford hurried to Ireland to levy forces, 
Charles summoned what from its brief duration is known as the 
Short Parliament. The Houses met in a mood which gave hopes 
of an accommodation with the Crown, but all hope of bringing 
them into an attack on Scotland proved fruitless. The intercepted 
letters were quietly set aside, and the Commons declared as of old 
that redress of grievances must precede the grant of supplies. Even 
an offer to relinquish ship-money failed to draw Parliament from its 
resolve, and after three weeks' sitting it was roughly dissolved. " Things 
must go worse before they go better " was the cool comment of St. 
John, one of the patriot leaders. But the country was strangely 
moved. "So great a defection in the kingdom/' wrote Lord Northum- 
berland, " hath not been known in the memory of man." Strafford 
alone stood undaunted. He had returned from Ireland, where he had 
easily obtained money and men from his servile Parliament, to pour 
fresh vigour into the Royal counsels, and to urge that, by the refusal 
of the Parliament to supply the King's wants, Charles was freed from all 
rule of government, and entitled to supply himself at his will. The 
Earl was bent upon war, and took command of the Royal army, which 
again advanced to the north. But the Scots were already across 
the Border ; forcing the passage of the Tyne in the face of an English 
detachment, they occupied Newcastle, and despatched from that 
town their proposals of peace. They prayed the King to consider 
their grievances, and, " with the advice and consent of the Estates 
of England convened in Parliament, to settle a firm and desirable 
peace." The prayer was backed by preparations for a march upon 
York, where Charles had already abandoned himself to despair. 
Behind him in fact England was all but in revolt. The London 
apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and broke up the sittings of 
the High Commission at St. Paul's. The war was denounced every- 
where as " the Bishops' War," and the new levies murdered officers 
whom they suspected of Papistry, broke down altar-rails in every 
church they passed, and deserted to their homes. Even in the camp 
itself neither the threats nor prayers of Strafford could recall the troops 
to their duty, and he was forced to own that two months were required 
before they could be fit for the field. The success of the Scots 
emboldened two peers. Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, to present a 
petition for peace to the King himself ; and though Strafford arrested 



Sec. v. 

The 
Tyranny 

1629- 

1640. 



\i\^fX 



ciS 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



and proposed to shoot them, the Council shrank from desperate courses. 
The threat of a Scotch advance forced Charles at last to give way, and 
after endeavouring to evade the necessity of convoking a Parliam.ent 
by summoning a " Great Council of the Peers" at York, the general 
repudiation of his project drove him to summon the Houses once 
more to Westminster. 

Section VI.— The laong Parliament. 164.0— 164-4, 

{^Authorities . — Clarendon's ** History of the Rebellion," as Hallam justly 
says, *' belongs rather to the class of memoirs" than of histories. The 
strange contrast between the conduct of its author at the time and his later ac- 
count of the Parliament's proceedings, as well as the deliberate and malignant 
falsehood with which he has perverted almost every fact, destroy his value as an 
authority during this earlier period, though his work will always retain a literary 
interest from its nobleness of style and the grand series of character-portraits 
which it embodies. May's ** History of the Long Parliament " is, for this 
earlier time, accurate and fairly impartial. But the real bases of any account of 
it must be found in its own proceedings, as they are preserved in the Notes of Sir 
Ralph Verney (edited by Mr. Bruce), and Sir Symonds D'Ewes. On the 
latter of these Mr. Forsterhas based his history of **The Grand Remonstrance," 
with his subsequent work on *' The Arrest of the Five Members," which may 
be taken as the best text -books for the period they cover. Rushworth's collec- 
tion of State Papers is invaluable for any exact study of the times ; that of his 
rival, Nalson, is untrustworthy, and of small importance. Both may be sup- 
plemented by the Clarendon and Plardwicke State Papers. Among the series 
of Memoirs which illustrate the whole period of the Rebellion we may as yet 
consult those of Whitelock, Ludlow, Warwick, Mrs. Hutchinson, and the 
** Life of Clarendon." For Irish affairs see Carte's *'Life of Ormond," and 
the accompanying papers; for Scotch, Baillie's ** Letters," and Mr. Burton's 
History. Lingard is useful for information as to intrigues with the Catholics in 
England and Ireland ; and Guizot directs special attention to the relations 
with foreign powers. Pym has been fairly sketched with other statesmen of 
the time by Mr. Forster in his *' Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and in an 
Essay on him by Mr. Goldwin Smith. A good deal of valuable research for 
the period in general is to be found in Mr. Sandford's *' Illustrations of the 
Great Rebellion."] 

If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of 
the Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at West- 
minster, stands out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A 
Somersetshire gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he 
entered on pubhc life in the Parhament of 1614, and was imprisoned 
for his patriotism at its close. He had been a leading member in 
that of 1620, and one of the "twelve ambassadors" for whom James 
ordered chairs to be set at Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with 
whom he had stood side by side in the constitutional struggle against 
the earher despotism of Charles he was the sole survivor. Coke had 
died of old age ; Cotton's heart was broken by oppression ; EHot had 
perished in the Tower ; W^entworth had apostatized. Pym alone re- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



519 



X HIT. 

Long Par- 

LIAMEK1 . 

1640- 
1644-. 



; 



mained, resolute, patient as of old ; and as the sense of his great- 
ness grew silently during the eleven years of deepening tyranny, the 
hope and faith of better things clung almost passionately to the man 
who never doubted of the final triumph of freedom and the law. 
At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all the more notable for 
their bitter tone of hate, " he was the most popular man, and the most 
able to do hurt, that have lived at any time." He had shown he knev/ 
how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew how 
to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England 
to quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at 
last ; and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not 
merel}^ as member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head. 
Few of the country gentlemen, indeed, who formed the bulk of the 
members, had sat in any previous House ; and of the few, none 
represented in so eminent a way the Parliamentaiy tradition on which 
the coming struggle was to turn. Pyiu^-s^jeloquence, inferior in bold- 
ness and originality to that of Eliot or Wentworth, was better suited 
by its massive and logical force to convince and guide a great party ; 
and it was backed by a calmness of temper, a dexterity and order in 
the management of public business, and a practical power of shaping 
the course of debate, which gave a form and method to Parlia- 
mentary proceedings such as they had never had before. Valuable, 
however, as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality which 
raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of Parliamentary 
leaders. Of the five hundred members who sate round him at St. 
Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as 
clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. 
It was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with 
the Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of 
Commons would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by 
the House of Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional 
school stood helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, 
a conflict for which no provision had been made by the law, and on 
which precedents threw only a doubtful ,and conflicting light. But 
with a knowledge of precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high 
above them in his grasp of constitutional principles. He was the first 
English statesman who discovered, and applied to the political cir- 
cumstances around him, what may be called the doctrine of constitu- 
tional proportion. He saw that as an element of constitutional life 
Parliament was of higher value than the Crown ; he saw, too, that in 
Parliament itself the one essential part was the House of Commons. 
On these two facts he based his whole policy in the contest which 
followed. When Charles refused to act with the Parliament, Pym 
treated the refusal as a temporary abdication on the part of the 
sovereign, which vested the executive power in the two Houses 



7 



JJISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



until new arrangements were made. When the Lords obstructed 
public business, he warned them that obstruction would only force 
the Commons " to save the kingdom alone." Revolutionary as these 
principles seemed at the time, they have both been recognized as 
bases of our constitution since the days of Pyni. The first principle 
was established by the Convention and Parliament which followed on 
the departure of James the Second ; the second by the acknowledge- 
ment on ail sides since the Reform Bill of 1832 that the government 
of the country is really in the hands of the House of Commons, and 
can only be carried on by ministers who represent the majority of 
that House. Pym's temper, indeed, was the very opposite of the 
temper of a revolutionist. Few natures have ever been wider in 
their range of sympathy or action. Serious as his purpose v/as, his 
manners were genial, and even courtly : he turned easily from an 
invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the 
grace and gaiety of his social tone, even when the care and 
weight of public affairs were bringing him to his grave, gave rise 
to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient Royalists. It was 
this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force 
in his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power 
as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest 
of diplomatists and the grandest of demagogues. He was equally at 
home in tracking the subtle intricacies of the Army Plot, or in kindling 
popular passion with words of fire. Though past middle life when 
his work really began, for he was born in 1584, four years before the 
coming of the Annada, he displayed from the first meeting of the 
Long Parliament the qualities of a great administrator, an immense 
faculty for labour, a genius for organization, patience, tact, a power of 
inspiring confidence in all whom he touched, calmness and modera- 
tion under good fortune or ill, an immovable courage, an iron will. 
No English ruler has ever shown greater nobleness of natural temper 
or a wider capacity for government than the Somersetshire squire 
whom his enemies, made clear-sighted by their hate, greeted truly 
enough as " King Pym.^' 

His ride over England on the eve of the elections had been hardly 
needed, for the summ^ons of a Parliament at once woke the kingdom to 
a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was suddenly and 
utterly suspended ; " the change," said Winthrop, " made all men to stay 
in England in expectation of a new world." The public discontent 
spoke from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed itself in a sudden burst 
of pamplilets, the first-fruits of the thirty thousand which were issuec 
before the Restoration, and which turned England at large into a school 
of political discussion. The resolute looks of the members as the) 
gathered at Westminster contrasted with the hesitating words of the 
King, and each brought from borough or county a petition of griev- 



yVIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAAW. 



521 



ances. Fresh petitions were brought every day by bands of citizens 
or farmers. Forty committees were appointed to examine and report 
on them, and their reports formed the grounds on which the Commons 
acted. One by one the illegal acts of the Tyranny were annulled. 
Prynne and his fellow " mart}'rs,'' recalled from their prisons, entered 
London in triumph amidst the shouts of a great m^ultitude who strewed 
laurel in their path. The civil and criminal jurisdiction of the Privy 
Council, the Star Chamber, the court of High Commission, the irre- 
gular jurisdictions of the Council of the North, of the Duchy of 
Lancaster, the County of Chester, and a crowd of lesser tribunals were 
summarily abolished. Ship-money was declared illegal, and the 
judgment in Hampden's case annulled. A statute declaring "the ancient 
right of the subjects of this kingdom that no subsidy, custom, import, 
or any charge whatsoever, ought or may be laid or imposed upon any 
merchandize exported or imiported by subjects, denizens, or aliens, 
without common consent in Parliament," put an end for ever to all pre- 
tensions to a right of arbitrary taxation on the part of the Crown. 
A Triennial Bill enforced the assembly of the Houses ever}^ three years 
and bound the sheriffs and citizens to proceed to election if the Royal 
writ failed to summon them. Charles protested, but gave way. He 
was forced to look helplessly on at the wreck of his Tyranny, for the 
Scotch army was still encamped in the north ; and the Parliament, 
which saw in the presence of the Scots a security against its own 
dissolution, w^as in no hurry to vote the money necessary for their 
withdrawal. " We cannot do without them," Strode honestly con- 
fessed, " the Philistines are still too strong for us." Meanwhile the 
Commons were dealing roughly with the agents of the Royal system. 
In every county a list of the Royal officers, under the name of " de- 
linquents," was ordered to be prepared and laid before the Houses. 
Windebank, the Secretary of State, with the Chancellor, Finch, fled in 
terror over sea. Laud himself was flung into prison. The shadow 
perhaps of what was to come falls across the pages of his Diary, and 
softens the hard temper of the man into a strange tenderness. *^ I 
stayed at Lambeth till the evening,'^ writes the Archbishop, " to avoid 
the gaze of the people. I w^ent to evening prayer in my chapel. The 
Psalms of the day, and chapter fifty of Isaiah, gave me great comfort. 
God make me worthy of it and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge 
hundreds of my poor neighbours stood there, and prayed for my 
safety and return to my house. For which I bless God and them.'^ 

But even Laud, hateful as he was to all but the poor neighbours 
v/hose prayers his alms had won, was not the centre of so great and 
imiversal a hatred as the Earl of Straftbrd. Strafford's guilt was 
more than the guilt of a servile instrument of tyranny, it was the 
guilt of "that grand apostate to the Commonwealth who," in the 
terrible words which closed Lord Digby's invective, " must not expect 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Long Par- 
liament. 
1640- 
1644. 



522 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. [Chap. 



to be pardoned in this world till he be despatched to the other." 
He was conscious of his danger, but Charles forced him to attend the 
Court ; and with characteristic boldness he resolved to anticipate 
attack by charging the Parliamentary leaders with a treasonable 
correspondence with the Scots. He was just laying his scheme before 
Charles when the news reached him that Pym was at the bar of the 
Lords with his impeachment for High Treason. " With speed," writes 
an eye-witness, " he comes to the House : he calls rudely at the door/' 
and, " with a proud glooming look, makes towards his place at the 
board-head. But at once many bid him void the House, so he is 
forced in confusion to go to the door till he was called/' He was only 
recalled to hear his committal to the Tower. He was still resolute to 
retort the charge of treason on his foes, and " offered to speak, but was 
commanded to be gone without a word." The keeper of the Black 
rod demanded his sword as he took him in charge. ?" This done, 
he makes through a number of people towards his coach, no man 
capping to him, before whom that morning the greatest of all 
England would have stood uncovered." The effect of the blow 
was seen in the cessation on the King's part of his old tone of 
command, and in the attempt he made to construct a ministry 
from among the patriots, with Lord Bedford at their head, on con- 
I dition that Strafford's life should be spared. But the price was too 
I high to pay ; the negotiations were interrupted by Bedford's death, 
j and by the discovery that Charles had been listening all the while to a 
knot of adventurers who proposed to bring about his end by stirring 
the army to an attack, on the Parliament. The discovery of the Army 
Plot sealed Strafford's fate. The trial of his Impeachment began \\\ 
Westminster Hall, and the whole of the House of Commons appeared 
to support it. The passion which the cause excited was seen in the 
loud cries of sympathy or hatred which burst from the crowded benches 
on either side. For fifteen days Strafford struggled with a remarkable 
courage and ingenuity against the list of charges, and he had melted 
his audience to tears by the pathos of his defence when the trial was 
suddenly interrupted. Though tyranny and misgovernment had been 
conclusively proved against him, the technical proof of treason was 
weak. " The law of England," to use Hallam's words, " is silent as to 
conspiracies against itself," and treason by the Statute of Edward the 
Third was restricted to a levying of war against the King or a com- 
passing of his death. The Commons endeavoured to strengthen their 
case by bringing forward the notes of a meeting of the Council in 
which Strafford had urged the use of his Irish troops " to reduce this 
kingdom to obedience ; " but the words were still technically doubtful, 
and the Lords would only admit the evidence on condition of wholly 
reopening the case. Pym and Hampden remained convinced of the 
sufftciency of the impeachment ; but the House broke loose from their 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



523 



control, and, guided by St. John and Lord Falkland, resolved to abandon 
these judicial proceedings, and fall back on the resource of a Bill of 
Attainder. Their course has been bitterly censured by some whose 
opinion in such a matter is entitled to respect. But the crime of 
Strafford was none the less a crime that it did not fall within the 
scope of the Statute of Treasons. It is impossible indeed to provide 
for some of the greatest dangers which can happen to national freedom 
by any formal statute. Even now a minister might avail himself of 
the temper of a Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, 
and, though the nation returned to its senses, might simply by refusing 
to appeal to the country govern in defiance of its will. Such a course 
would be technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less 
a criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of 
Treasons or no, was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of 
the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of 
self-defence, and the Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such a 
right for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within the scope of 
no written law. The chance of the offender's escape roused the Lon- 
doners to frenzy, and crowds surrounded the Houses, with cries of 
" Justice," while the Lords passed the Bill. The Earl's one hope was 
in the King, but three days later the royal sanction was given, and he 
passed to his doom. Strafford died as he had lived. His friends warned 
him of the vast multitude gathered before the Tower to witness his 
fall. " I know how to look death in the face, and the people too," he 
answered proudly. " I thank God I am no more afraid of death, but 
as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I went 
to bed." As the axe fell, the silence of the great multitude was broken 
by a universal shout of joy. The streets blazed with bonfires. The 
bells clashed out from every steeple. " Many," says an observer, " that 
came to town to see the execution rode in triumph back, waving their 
hats, and with all expressions of joy through every town they went, 
crying, ' His head is off ! His head is off ! ' " 

Great as were the changes which had been wrought in the first six 
months of the Long Parliament, they had been based strictly on pre- 
cedent, and had, in fact, been simply a restoration of the older English 
constitution as it existed at the close of the Wars of the Roses. But 
every day made it harder to remain quietly in this position. On the 
one hand, the air, since the army conspiracy, was full of rumours 
and panic ; the creak of a few boards revived the memory of the 
Gunpowder Plot, and the members rushed out of the House of Com- 
mons in the full belief that it was undermined. On the other hand, 
Charles regarded his consent to the new measures as having been ex- 
torted by force, and to be retracted at the first opportunity. Both 
Houses, in their terror, swore to defend the Protestant religion and 
the public liberties, an oath which was subsequently exacted from every 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Long Par- 
liament. 
IS^O- 
164.4-. 



Mayy 1641, 



The 

Grand 

Remon* 

strance. 



524 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



one engaged in civil employment, and voluntarily taken by the great 
mass of the people. The same terror of a counter-revolution induced 
Hyde and the *^ moderate men " in the Commons to bring in a bill 
providing that the present Parliament should not be dissolved but by 
its own consent. Charles signed the Bill without protest, but he was 
already seeking aid from France, and preparing for the counter-revolu- 
tion it was meant to meet. / Hitherto, the Scotch army had held him 
down, but its payment and withdrawal could no longer be delayed, 
and it was no sooner on its way homeward than the King resolved 
to prevent its return. In spite of prayers from the Parliament 
he left London for Edinburgh, yielded to every demand of the 
Assembly and the Scotch Estates, attended the Presbyterian worship, 
lavished titles and favours on the Earl of Argyle and the patriot 
leaders, and gained for a few months a popularity which spread 
dismay in the English Parliament. Their dread of his designs was 
increased w4ien he was found to have been intriguing all the while with 
the Earl of Montrose — who had seceded from the patriot party before 
his coming, and been rewarded for his secession with imprisonment 
in the castle of Edinburgh — and when Hamilton and Argyle withdrew 
suddenly from the capital, and charged the King with a treacherous 
plot to seize and carry them out of the realm. The popular fright 
was fanned to frenzy by news which came suddenly from Ireland, 
where the fall of Strafford had put an end to all semblance of rule. 
The disbanded soldiers of the army he had raised spread over the 
country, and stirred the smouldering disaffection into a flame. A 
conspiracy, organized with wonderful power and secrecy, burst forth 
in Ulster, where the confiscation of the Settlement had never been 
forgiven, and spread hke wildfire over the centre and wxst of the 
island. Dublin was saved by a mere chance; but in the open country 
the work of murder went on unchecked. Fifty thousand English 
people perished in a few days, and rumour doubled and trebled the ; 
number. Tales of horror and outrage, such as maddened our own 
England when they reached us from Cawnpore, came day after day 
over the Irish Channel. Sworn depositions told how husbands were 
cut to pieces in presence of their wives, their children's brains dashed 
out before their faces, their daughters brutally violated and driven out 
naked to perish frozen in the woods. "Some," says May, "were 
burned on set purpose, others drowned for sport or pastime, and if 
they swam kept from landing with poles, or shot, or murdered in the 
water ; many were buried quick, and some set into the earth breast- 
high and there left to famish.^' The new feature of the revolt, beside 
the massacre with which it opened, was its religious character. It 
was no longer a struggle, as of old, of Celt against Saxon, but of 
Catholic against Protestant. The Papists within the Pale joined 
hands in it with the wild kernes outside the Pale. The rebels called them- 



I 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



525 



selves " Confederate Catholics/' resolved to defend " the public and 
free exercise of the true and Cathohc Roman religion." The panic 
waxed greater when it was found that they claimed to be acting by 
the King's commission, and in aid of his authority. They professed 
to stand by Charles and his heirs against all that should '' directly and 
indirectly endeavour to suppress their Royal prerogatives." They 
showed a Commission, purporting to have been issued by Royal com- 
mand at Edinburgh, and styled themselves " the King's army." The 
Commission was a forgery, but belief in it was quickened by the want 
of ail sympathy with the national honour which Charles displayed. 
To him the revolt seemed a useful check on his opponents. " I hope," 
he wrote coolly, when the news reached him, " this ill news of Ireland 
may hinder some of these follies in England." Above all, it would 
necessitate the raising of an army, and with an army at his command 
he would again be the master of the Parliament. The Parliament, on 
the other hand, saw in the Irish revolt the disclosure of a vast scheme 
for a counter-revolution, of which the withdrawal of the Scotch army, 
the reconciliation of Scotland, the intrigues at Edinburgh, the exulta- 
tion of the royalists at the King's return, and the appearance of a 
royalist party in the House itself, were all parts. At the head of the 
new party stood Lord Falkland, a man learned and accomplished, the 
centre of a circle which embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day, 
a keen reasoner and able speaker, whose convictions still went with 
the Parliament, while his wavering and impulsive temper, his love of 
the Church, which was now being threatened, his passionate longings 
for peace, his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a King 
whom he distrusted, and to die in a cause that was not his own. 
Behind him clustered intriguers like Hyde, chivalrous soldiers like 
Sir Edmund Verney (" I have eaten the King's bread and served him 
now thirty years, and I will not do so base a thing as to distrust him"), 
men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the dangers 
which threatened Episcopacy. With a broken Parliament, and perils 
gathering without, Pym resolved to appeal for aid to the nation itself. The 
llSolemn Remonstrance which he laid before the House was a detailed 
parrative of the work which the Parliament had done, the difficulties it 
iiad surmounted, and the new dangers which lay in its path. The Parlia- 
ment had been charged with a design to abolish Episcopacy, it 
declared its purpose to be simply that of reducing the power of 
Bishops. Politically it repudiated the taunt of revolutionary aims, 
It demanded only the observance of the existing laws against Papistry, 
securities for the due administration of justice, and the employment of 
ministers who possessed the confidence of Parhament. The new 
King's party fought fiercely, debate followed debate, the sittings weres, 
prolonged till, for the first time in the history of the House, lights had<^ 
ho be brought in ; and it was only at midnight, and by a majority of 



^ 



526 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Long Par- 
liament. 

1640. 

1644. 



Arrest of 
tlie Five 
Members 



eleven, that the Remonstrance was finally adopted^ after a scene of 
unexampled violence. On an attempt of the minority to offer a formal 
protest the slumbering passion burst into a flame. " Some waved 
their hats over their heads, and others took their swords in their 
scabbards out of their belts, and held them by the pommels in their 
hands, setting the lower part on the ground." Only Hampden's 
coolness and tact averted a conflict. The Remonstrance was felt on 
both sides to be a crisis in the struggle. " Had it been rejected," said 
Cromwell, as he left the House, " I would have sold to-morrow all 
I possess, and left England for ever." Listened to sullenly by the 
King, it kindled afresh the spirit of the country : London swore to 
live and die with the Parliament ; associations were formed in every 
county for the defence of the Houses ; and when the guard which 
Lord Essex had given them was withdrawn by the King, the populace 
crowded down to Westminster to take its place. 

The question which had above all broken the unity of the Parlia- 
ment had been the question of the Church. All were agreed on the 
necessity of its reform, for the Laudian party of High Churchmen 
v/ere rendered powerless by the course of events ; and one of the 
first acts of the Parliament had been to appoint a Committee of 
Religion for this purpose. Within, as without the House, the general 
opinion was in favour of a reduction of the power and wealth of the 
Church, without any radical change in its constitution. Even among 
the bishops themselves, the more prominent saw the need for consent- 
ing to the abolition of Chapters and Bishops' Courts, as well as to the 
creation of a council of ministers in each diocese, which had been 
suggested by Archbishop Usher as a check on episcopal autocracy. 
A scheme to this effect was drawn up by Bishop Williams of Lincoln ; 
but it wa| /ar from meeting the wishes of the general body of the 
Commons^ I Pym and Lord Falkland demanded, in addition to these 
changes, a severance of the clergy from all secular or. state offices, and 
an expulsion of the bishops from the House of Lords. j|The last demand 
was backed by a petition from seven hundred ministers of the Church ; but 
the strife between the two sections of episcopal reformers gave strength 
to the growing party who demanded the abohtion of Episcopacy alto- 
gether. The doctrines of Cartwright had risen into popularity under 
the persecution of Laud, and Presbyterianism was now a formidable 
force among the middle classes. Its chief strength lay in the eastern 
counties and in London, where a few ministers such as Calamy and 
Marshall had formed a committee for its diffusion ; while in Parliament 
it was represented by Lord Brooke, Lord Mandeville, and Lord Saye 
I and Sele. In the Commons Sir Harry Vane represented a more ex- 
Itreme party of reformers, the Independents of the future, whose senti- 
j ments were little less hostile to Presbyterianism than to Episcopacy, 
but who acted with the Presbyterians for the present, and formed a 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



527 



part of what became known as the " Root and Branch party," from its 
demand for the extirpation of prelacy. The attitude of Scotland in 
the great struggle with tyranny, and the political advantage of a reli- 
gious union between the two kingdoms, as well as the desire to knit 
the English Church more closely to the general body of Protestantism, 
gave fresh force to the Presbyterian scheme. Milton, who after the 
composition of his ^^Lycidas," had spent a year in foreign travel, but 
liad been called home from Italy by the opening of the Parliament, 
threw himself hotly into the theological strife. He held it " an un- 
just thing that the English should differ from all Churches as 
many as be reformed." f In spite of this pressure however, and of a 
Petition from London with fifteen thousand signatures to the same 
purport, the Committee of Religion reported in favour of the moderate 
reforms suggested by Falkland and Pym ; and the first of these was 
embodied by the former in a bill for the expulsion of bishops from, the 
House of Peers, which passed the Commons almost unanimously. 
Rejected by the Lords on the eve of the King's journey to Scotland, 
it was again introduced on his return ; but, in spite of violent remon- 
f^trances from the Commons, the bill still hung fire among the Peers. 
The delay roused the excited crowd of Londoners who gathered round 
.Vhitehall ; the bishops^ carriages were stopped ; and the prelates 
hemselves rabbled on their way to the House. The angry pride of 
>Villiams induced ten of his fellow bishops to declare themselves pre- 
'ented from attendance in Parliam.ent, and to protest against all acts 
oone in their absence as null and void. The Protest was met at once 
on the part of the Peers by the committal of the prelates wdio had 
signed it to the Tower. But the contest gave a powerful aid to the 
projects of the King. The courtiers declared openly that the rabbling 
of the bishops proved that there was " no free Parliament," and strove 
to bring about fresh outrages by gathering troops of officers and 
soldiers of fortune, who were seeking for employment in the Irish 
war, and pitting them against the crowds at Whitehall. The brawls of 
the two parties, who gave each other the nicknames of " Round-heads " 
and " Cavaliers," created fresh alarm in the Parliament ; but Charles 
persisted in refusing it a guard. " On the honour of a King,'^ he 
engaged to defend them, from violence as completely as his own children, 
but the answer had hardly been given when his Attorney appeared at 
the bar of the Lords, and accused Hampden, Pym, Hollis, Strode, and \ 
Haslerig of high treason in their correspondence with the Scots. K 
herald at arms appeared at the bar of the Commons, and demanded 
the surrender of the five members. All constitutional law was set aside 
by a charge which proceeded personally from the King, which deprived 
the accused of their legal right to a trial by their peers, and summoned 
them before a tribunal which had lio pretence to a jurisdiction over 
them. The Commons simply promised to take the demand into 



52S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. consideration, and again requested a guard. " I will reply to-morrow," 
said the King. On the morrow he summoned three hundred gentlemen 
to follow him, and, embracing the Queen, promised her that in an hour 
he would return master of his kingdom. A mob of Cavaliers joined 
him as he left the palace, and remained in Westminster Hall as Charles, 
accompanied by his nephew, the Elector-Palatine, entered the House of 
Commons. " Mr. Speaker," he said, " I m.ust for a time borrow your 
chair !" He paused with a sudden confusion as his eye fell on the vacant 
spot where Pym commonly sate : for at the news of his approach the 
House had ordered the five members to withdraw. *^ Gentlemen," he 
began in slow broken sentences, '* I am sorry for this occasion of coming 
unto you. Yesterday I sent a Sergeant-at-arms upon a very important 
occasion, to apprehend some that by my command were accused of 
high treason, whereunto I did expect obedience, and not a message." 
Treason, he went on, had no privilege, " and therefore I am come to 
know if any of these persons that were accused are here." There was 
a dead silence, only broken by his reiterated " I must have them where- 
soever I find them." He again paused, but the stillness was unbroken. 
Then he called out, ^^ Is Mr. Pym here ? " There was no answer ; and 
Charles, turning to the Speaker, asked him whether the five members 
were there. Lenthall fell on his knees, and replied that he had neither 
eyes nor tongue to see or say anything save what the House commanded 
him. " Well, well," Charles angrily retorted, " 'tis no matter. I think 
my eyes are as good as another's ! " There was another long pause, 
while he looked carefully over the ranks of members. " I see," he said 
at last, " my birds are flown, but I do expect you will send them to 
me." If they did not, he added, he would seek them himself; and 
with a closing protest that he never intended any force, "he went out 
of the House," says an eye-witness, "in a more discontented and 
angry passion than he came in." 

* Nothing but the absence of the five members, and the calm dignity 
of the Commons, had prevented the King's outrage from' ending in 
bloodshed. "It was believed," says Whitelocke, who was present at 
the scene, " that if the King had found them there, and called in his 
guards to have seized them, the members of the House would have 
endeavoured the defence of them, which might have proved a very 
unhappy and sad business." Five hundred gentlemen of the best 
blood in England would hardly have stood tamely by while the bravoes 
of Whitehall laid hands on their leaders in the midst of the Parliament. 
But Charles was blind to the danger of his new course. The five mem- 
bers had taken refuge in the city, and it was there that on the next ; 
day the King himself demanded their surrender from the aldermen at 
Guildhall. Cries of " Privilege " rang round him as he returned through : 
the streets : the writs issued for the arrest of the five were disregarded 
by the Sheriffs, and a proclamation issued four days later, declaring 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND.. 



529 



them traitors, was answered by their triumphant return to St. Stephen's, j 
The Trained Bands of London and Southwark were on foot, and the 
London watermen, sworn " to guard the Parhament, the Kingdom, and 
the King," escorted the five members as they passed along the river to 
Westminster. Terror drove the Cavahers from Whitehall, and Charles 
stood absolutely alone ; for the outrage had severed him for the moment 
from his new friends in the Parliament, and from the ministers, Falkland 
and Colepepper, whom he had chosen among them. But lonely as he 
was, Charles had resolved on war. The Earl of Newcastle was 
despatched to muster a Royal force in the north ; and as the five 
members re-entered the House, Charles withdrew from Whitehall. 
Both sides prepared for the coming struggle. The Queen sailed from 
Dover v/ith thecrown jewels to buy munitions of war. The Cavaliers again 
gathered round the King, and the Royalist press flooded the country 
with State papers drawn up by Hyde. On the other hand, mounted 
processions of freeholders from Buckinghamshire and Kent traversed 
London on their way to St» Stephen's, vowing to live and die with the 
Parliament. The Tower was blockaded, and the two great arsenals, 
Portsmouth and Hull, secured by Pym's forethought. The Lords 
were scared out of their policy of obstruction by his bold announce- 
ment of the new position taken by the House of Commons. '* The 
Commons," said their leader, "'' will be glad to have your concurrence 
and help in saving the kingdom ; but if they fail of it, it should not' 
discourage them in doing their duty. And whether the kingdom be 
lost or saved, they shall be sorry that the story of this present 
Parliament should tell posterity that in so great a danger and extremity 
the House of Commons should be enforced to save the kingdom alone.'' 
The effect of Pym's words was seen in the passing of the bill for 
I excluding bishops from the House of Lords. The great point, how- 
' ever, was to secure armed support from the nation at large, and here 
I both sides were in a difhculty. Previous to the innovations introduced 
i oy the Tudors, and which had been taken away by the bill against 
{ pressing soldiers, the King in himself had no power of calling on his 
I subjects generally to bear arms, save for purposes of restoring order 
jor meeting foreign invasion. On the other hand, no one contended 
that such a power had ever been exercised by the two Houses without 
.the King; and Charles steadily refused to consent to the Mihtia bill, 
,in which the command of the national force was given in every county 
to men devoted to the Parhamentary cause. Both parties therefore 
broke through constitutional precedent, the Parliament in appointing 
Lord Lieutenants of the Militia by ordinance of the two Houses, 
Charles in levying forces by Royal commissions of array. The King's 
great difficulty lay in procuring aims, and at the end of April he 
suddenly appeared before Hull, the magazine of the north, and de- 
manded admission. The new governor, Sir John Hotham, fell on his 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Long Par- 
liament. 
1640- 
1644. 



J,xn. 10. 



530 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Ckap. 



knees, but refused to open the gates : and the avowal of his act by 
the Parliament was followed by the withdrawal of the new Royalist 
party among its members from their seats at Westminster. Falkland, 
Colepepper, and Hyde, with thirty-two peers and sixty members of the 
House of Commons, joined Charles at York ; and Lyttelton, the Lord 
Keeper, followed with the Great Seal. But the King^s warlike pro- 
jects were still checked by the general opposition of the country. A 
great meeting of the Yorkshire freeholders which he convened on 
Heyworth Moor ended in a petition praying him to be reconciled to 
the Parliament, and in spite of gifts of plate from the Universities 
and nobles of his party arms and money were still wanting for his 
new levies. Olie two Houses, on the other Jband, gained in unity and 
vigour by the withdrawal of the Royalistsr^jThe Militia was rapidly 
enrolled. Lord Warwick named to the command of the fleet, and a 
loan opened in the city to which the women brought even their wedding 
rings. The tone of the two Houses had risen with the threat of force : 
and their last proposals demanded the powers of appointing and dis- 
missing the Royal ministers, naming guardians for the Royal children, 
and of virtually controlling military, civil, and religious affairs. "If 
I granted your demands," replied Charles, " I should be no more 
than the mere phantom of a king.'' 

Section VII.— The Civil War. July 1642~Aiig. 164-6. 

\^Autho7'ities. — To those given in the previous section we may add Warbu^ 
ton's biography of Prince Rupert, Mr. Clement Markham's admirable life of 
Fairfax, the Fairfax Correspondence, and Ludlow's ** Memoirs." Sprigg's 
" Anglia Rediviva " gives the best account of the New Model and its doings. 
For Cromwell, the primary authority is Mr. Carlyle's ** Life and Letters," an 
invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the 
genius of a poet. Clarendon, who is now of great value, gives a fine account 
of the Cornish rising.] 



Aug. 23, 



The breaking off of negotiations was followed on both sides by pre- 
parations for immediate war. Hampden, Pym, and Hollis, became the 
guiding spirits of a Committee of Public Safety which was created by 
Parliament as its administrative organ ; English and Scotch officers 
were drawn from the Low Countries, and Lord Essex named com- 
mander of an army of twenty thousand foot and four thousand horse. 
The confidence on the Parliamentary side was great ; " we all thought 
one battle would decide," Baxter confessed after the first encounter ; 
for the King was almost destitute of money and arms, and in spite 
of his strenuous efforts to raise recruits he was embarrassed by the 
reluctance of his own adherents to begin the struggle. Resolved, 
however, to force on a contest, he raised the Royal Standard at 
Nottingham " on the evening of a very stormy and tempestuous day," 
1 but the country made no answer to his appeal ; v/hile Essex, who 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



531 



had quitted London amidst the shouts of a great multitude, with orders 
from the Parhament to follow the King, " and by battle or other 
way rescue him from his perfidious councillors and restore him to 
Parham.ent," mustered his army at Northampton. Charles had but 
a handful of men, and the dash of a few regiments of horse would 
have ended the war ; but Essex shrank from a decisive stroke, and 
trusted to reduce Charles to submission by a show of force. No 
sooner, however, had the King fallen back on Shrewsbury than the 
whole face of affairs suddenly changed. Catholics and Royalists 
rallied fast to his standard, and a bold march on London drew Essex I 
from his inactivity at Worcester to protect the capital. The tvvo \ 
armies fell in with one another on the field of Edgehill, near Banbury. 
The encounter was a surprise, and the battle which followed was little 
more than a confused combat of horse. At its outset the desertion of 
Sir Faithful Fortescue, with a whole regiment, threw the Parliamentary 
forces into disorder, while the Royalist horse on either wing drove 
their opponents from the field ; but the reserve of Lord Essex broke 
the Royalist foot, which formed the centre of the King's line, and 
though his nephew, Prince Rupert, brought back his squadrons in time 
to save Charles from capture or flight, the night fell on a drawn battle. 
The moral advantage, however, rested with the King. Essex had 
learned that his troopers were no match for the Cavaliers, and his 
withdrawal to Warwick left open the road to the capital. Rupert 
pressed for an instant march on London, but the proposal found 
stubborn opponents among the moderate Royalists, who dreaded the 
complete triumph of Charles as much as his defeat. The King there- 
fore paused for the time at Oxford, where he was received with up-- 
roarious welcome ; and when the cowardice of its garrison delivered 
Reading to Ruperf s horse, and his daring capture of Brentford drew 
the Royal army in his support almost to the walls of the capital, the 
I panic of the Londoners was already over, and the junction of their 
! trainbands with the army of Essex forced Charles to fall back again 
I on his old quarters. But though the Parliament rallied quickly from 
I the blow of Edgehill, the war, as its area widened through the winter, 
(I went steadily for the King. The fortification of Oxford gave him 
'; a firm hold on the midland counties ; while the balance of the two 
j parties in the north was overthrown by the march of the Earl of 
i Newcastle, with the force he had raised in Northumberland, upon 
,| York. Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary leader in that county, was 
\ thrown back on the manufacturing towns of the West Riding, where 
Puritanism found its stronghold ; and the arrival of the Queen with 
arms from Holla.nd encouraged the Royal army to push its scouts 
across the Trent, and threaten the eastern counties, which held firmly 
for the Parhament. The stress of the war was shown by the vigorous 
exertions of the two Houses. The negotiations which had gone on 

M M 2 



Sec. VII. 

The Civil 

War. 

1642- 

1646. 



5:)2 



mSTORY O'F THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CiM.r, 






into the spring were broken off by the old demand that the Kingi 
should return to his Parliament ; London was fortified ; and a tax 
of two millions a year was laid on the districts which adhered to the 
Parliamentary cause. Essex, whose army had been freshly equipped, 
was ordered to advance upon Oxfojd ; but though the King held«; 
himself ready to fall back on the west, the Earl shrank from agaiJj 
risking his raw army in an encounter. He confined himself to the re-' 
capture of Reading, and to a month of idle encampment round Brill, 
while disease thinned his ranks and the Royalists beat up his quarters. 
While Essex lingered and manoeuvred, Charles boldly detached a 
part of his small force at Oxford to strengthen a Royalist rising in 
the west. Nowhere was the Royal cause to take so brave or noble 
a form as among the Cornishmen. Cornwall stood apart from the 
general life of England : cut off from it not only by differences of 
blood and speech, but by the feudal tendencies of its people, who clung 
with a Celtic loyalty to their local chieftains, and suffered their fidelity 
to the Crown to determine their own. They had as yet done little more 
than keep the war out of their own county ; but the march of a small 
Parliamentary force under Lord Stamford upon Launceston forced them 
into action. A little band of Cornishmen gathered round the chivalrous 
Sir Bevil Greenvil, " so destitute of provisions that the best officers 
had but a biscuit a day," and with only a handful of powder for the 
whole force ; but starving and outnumbered as they were, they scaled 
the steep rise of Stratton Hill, sword in hand, and drove Stamford 
back on Exeter, with a loss of two thousand men, his ordnance and 
baggage train. Sir Ralph Hopton, the best of the Royalist generals, 
took the command of their army as it advanced into Somerset, and 
drew the stress of the war into the west. Essex despatched a picked 
force under Sir William Waller to check their advance ; but Somerset 
was already lost ere he reached Bath, and the Cornishmen stormed his 
strong position on Lansdowne Hill in the teeth of his guns. But 
the stubborn fight robbed the victors of their leaders ; Hopton was 
wounded, Greenvil slain, and with them fell the two heroes of the 
little army. Sir Nicholas Slanning and Sir John Trevanion, "both 
young, neither of them above eight and twenty, of entire friendship 
to one another, and to Sir Bevil Greenvil." Waller, beaten as he was, 
hung on their weakened force as it moved for aid upon Oxford, and 
succeeded in cooping up the foot in Devizes. But the horse broke 
through, and joining an army which had been sent to their relief under 
Wilmot, afterwards Lord Rochester, turned back, and dashed Waller's 
army to pieces in a fresh victory on Roundway Down. The Cornish 
rising seemed to have turned the tide of the war. Strengthened by 
their earlier successes, and by the succours which his Queen brought 
from the north, Charles had already prepared to advance, when Rupert, 
in a daring raid upon Wycombe, met a party of Parliamentary horse, 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



with Hampden at its head, on Chalgrove field. The skirmish ended 
in the success of the Royahsts, and Hampden was seen riding off the 
field "before the action was done, which he never used to do, and 
with his head hanging down, and resting his hands upon the neck of 
his horse." He was mortally wounded, and his death seemed an 
omen of the ruin of the cause he loved. Disaster followed disaster. 
Essex, more and more anxious for a peace, fell back on Uxbridge ; 
while a cowardly surrender of Bristol to Prince Rupert gave Charles the 
second city of the kingdom, and the mastery of the west. The news 
fell on the Parliament " like a sentence of death." The Lords debated 
nothing but proposals of peace. London itself was divided ; " a great 
multitude of the wives of substantial citizens '' clamoured at the door 
of the Commons for peace ; and a flight of six of the few peers who 
remained at Westminster to the camp at Oxford proved the general 
despair of the Parliament's success. 

From this moment, however, the firmness of the Parliamentary 
leaders began slowly to reverse the fortunes of the war. Waller was 
received on his return from Roundway LI ill "as if he had brought the 
King prisoner with him." A new army was placed under the command 
of Lord Manchester to check the progress of Newcastle. In the west, 
indeed, things still went badly. Prince Maurice continued Rupert's 
career of success, and the conquest of Barnstaple and Exeter secured 
Devon for the King. Gloucester alone interrupted the communications 
between his forces in Bristol and in the north ; and Charles moved 
against the city, with hope of a speedy surrender. But the gallant 
resistance of the town called Essex to its relief. It was reduced to a 
single barrel of powder when the Earl's approach forced Charles to raise 
the siege ; and the Puritan army fell steadily back again on London, 
after an indecisive engagement near Newbury, in which Lord Falkland 
fell, " ingeminating ' Peace, peace ! ' " and the London trainbands flung 
Ruperf s horsemen roughly off their front of pikes. In this posture of 
his affairs nothing but a great victory could have saved the King, for 
the day which witnessed the triumphant return of Essex witnessed 
the solemn taking of the Covenant. Pym. had resolved, at last, to 
fling the Scotch sword into the wavering balance ; and in the darkest 
hour of the Parliament's cause Sir Harry Vane had been despatched 
to Edinburgh to arrange the terms on which the aid of Scotland 
would be given. First amongst them stood the demand of a " unity 
in Religion ; " an adoption, in other words, of the Presbyterian system 
' by the Church of England. Events had moved so rapidly since the 
i earlier debates on Church government in the Com.mons that some 
I arrangement of this kind had become a necessity. The bishops to a 
I man, and the bulk of the clergy whose bent was purely episcopal, had 
joined the Royal cause, and were being expelled from their livings as 
"delinquents." Some new system of Church government was impera- 



533 



Sec. VII. 

The Civ.L 

War. 

1643- 

i6A6. 



The Cove- 
nant. 



A.U^. 104.^. 



I Sep.-zi, 1643 



534 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. VII. j lively called for by the religious necessities of the country ; and, 
tliough Pym and the leading statesmen were still in opinion moderate 
Episcopalians, the growing force of Presbyterianism, as well as the 
needs of the war, forced them to seek such a system in the adoption 
of the Scotch discipline. Scotland, for its part, saw that the triumph 
of the Parliament was necessary for its own security ; and whatever 
difficulties stood in the way of Vane's wary and rapid negotiations 
were removed by the policy of the King. While the Parliament 
looked for aid to the north, Charles had long been seeking assistance 
from the Irish rebels. The Massacre had left them the objects of a 
vengeful hate such as England had hardly known before, but with 
Charles they were simply counters in his game of king-craft. The 
conclusion of a truce with them left the army under Lord Ormond, 
which had hitherto held their revolt in check, at the King's disposal 
for service in England ; and at the same moment he secured a force 
of Irish Catholics to support by their landing in Argyleshire a rising 
of the Highlands under Montrose, which aimed at the overthrow of 
the government at Edinburgh. None of the King's schemes proved 
so fatal to his cause as these. On their discovery officer after officer 
in his own army flung down their commissions, the peers who had 
fled to Oxford fled back again to London, and the Royalist reaction 
in the Parliament itself came utterly to an end. Scotland, anxious 
for its own safety, hastened to sign the Covenant ; and the Commons, 
" with uplifted hands," swore in St. Margaret's church to observe it. 
They pledged themselves to *' bring the Churches of God in the three 
Kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, con- 
fession of faith, form of Church government, direction for worship, 
and catechizing ; that we, and our posterity after us, may as brethren 
live in faith and love, and the Lord may delight to live in the midst 
of us " : to extirpate Popery, prelacy, superstition, schism, and pro- 
faneness ; to ^'preserve the rights and privileges of the Parliament, 
and the liberties of the Kingdom ; " to punish malignants and oppo 
nents of reformation in Church and State ; to "unite the two Kingdoms 
in a firm peace and union to all posterity." The Covenant ended with 
a solemn acknowledgment of national sin, and a vow of reformation. 
" Our true, unfeigned purpose, desire, and endeavour for ourselves and 
all others under our power and charge, both in public and private, in 
all duties we owe to God and man, is to amend our lives, and each 
one to go before another in the example of a real reformation." 

The conclusion of the Covenant had been the last work of Pym, 
but it was only a part of the great plan which he had formed, and 
which was carried out by the " Committee of the Two Kingdoms,' 
who were entrusted after his death with the conduct of the war, and oi 
1 foreign affairs. Three strong armies, comprising a force of fifty thousand 
I men, had been raised for the coming campaign. Essex, with the army 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



of the centre, was charged with the duty of watching the King at Oxford, 
and following him if he moved, as was expected, to the north against 
the Scots, Waller, with the army of the west, was ordered to check 
Prince Maurice, in Dorset and Devon.- The force of fourteen thousand 
men which had been raised by the zeal of the eastern counties, and in 
which Cromwell's name was becoming famous as a leader, was raised 
into a third army under Lord Manchester, and directed to co-operate 
in Yorkshire with Sir Thomas Fairfax and the Scots. Charles was 
at once thrown on the defensive. The Irish troops whose aid he 
had secured by his truce with the rebels were cut to pieces soon after 
their arrival in England, those who landed in the south by Waller, and 
their fellows in Cheshire by Sir Thomas Fairfax. The hands of the 
last commander had been freed by the march of Newcastle to the 
Border, which the Scots were crossing " in a great frost and snow ; " 
but after his dispersion of the Irish troops, he at once called back his 
opponent to York by a victory on his return over the forces which the 
Marquis had left to protect that capital. The plan of Pym was now 
rapidly developed. Essex and Waller joined in the blockade of 
Oxford, while Manchester and Fairfax united with the Scots under the 
walls of York. Newcastle's cry for aid had already been answered by the 
despatch of Prince Rupert from Oxford to gather forces on the Welsh 
border ; and the brilhant partizan, after breaking the sieges of Newark 
and Latham House, burst over the Lancashire Hills into Yorkshire, 
slipped by the Parliamentary army, and made his way untouched into 
York. But the success of his feat of arms tempted him to a fresh act 
of daring ; he resolved on a decisive battle, and a discharge of musketr}^ 
from the two armies as they faced each other on Marston Moor 
brought on, as evening gathered, a disorderly engagement. On the one 
flank a charge of the King's horse broke that of the Scotch ; on the 
other, Cromwell's brigade of " Ironsides " won as complete a success 
over Rupert's troopers. ^* God made them as stubble to our swords," 
wrote the general at the close of the day ; but in the heat of victory 
he called back his men from the chase to back Manchester in his 
attack on the Royalist foot, and to rout their other wing of horse as 
it returned breathless from pursuing the Scots. Nowhere had the 
fighting been so fierce. A young Puritan who lay dying on the field 
told Cromwell as he bent over him that one thing lay on his spirit. 
" I asked him what it was," Cromwell wrote aftenvards. ^* He told 
me it was that God had not suffered him to be any more the execu- 
tioner of his enemies." At night-fall all was over ; and the Royalist 
cause in the north had perished at a single blow. Newcastle fled over 
sea : York surrendered, and Rupert, with hardly a man at his back, 
rode southward to Oxford. The blow was the more terrible that it fell 
on Charles at a moment when his triumph in every other quarter was 
being secured by a series of brilliant and unexpected successes. After 



Sec. VII. 

The Civil 
War. 
1642- 
1646. 



536 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



a month's siege the King had escaped from Oxford ; had waited till 
Essex marched into the west ; and then, turning fiercely on Waller at 
Cropredy Bridge, had driven him back broken to London, two days 
before the battle at Marston Moor. Charles followed up his success 
by hurrying in the track of Essex, whom he hoped to crush between 
his own force and that under Prince Maurice which the Earl had 
marched to attack. By a fatal error, Essex plunged into Cornwall, 
where the country was hostile, and where the King hemmed him in 
among the hills, drew his lines tightly round his army, and forced the 
whole body of the foot to surrender at his mercy, while the horse cut 
their way through the besiegers, and Essex himself fled by sea to 
London. The day of the surrender was signalized by a Royalist 
triumph in Scotland which promised to undo what Marston Moor 
had done. The plot which had long since been formed for the con- 
quest of Scotland was revived by the landing of Irish soldiers in 
Argyle. Montrose, throwing himself into the Highlands, called the 
clans to arms ; and flinging his new force on that of the Covenanters 
at Tippermuir gained a victory which enabled him to occupy Perth, 
to sack Aberdeen, and to spread terror to Edinburgh. The news fired 
Charles, as he came up from the west, to venture on a march upoi? 
London ; but though the Scots were detained by the siege of Newcastle^ 
the rest of the victors at Marston Moor lay in his path at Newbury, 
and their force was strengthened by the army which had surrendered 
in Cornwall, and was again brought into the field. The furious charges 
of the Royalists failed to break the Parliamentary squadrons, and the 
soldiers of Essex wiped away the shame of their defeat by flinging 
themselves on the cannon they had lost, and bringing them back in 
triumph to their lines. Cromwell seized the moment of victory, and 
begged hard to be suffered to charge with his single brigade. But 
Manchester, like Essex, shrank from a crowning victory over the 
King. Charles was allowed to withdraw his army to Oxford, and eveiv 
to reappear unchecked in the field of his defeat. 

The quarrel of Cromwell with Lord Manchester at Newbury was 
destined to give a new colour and direction to the war. Pym, in fact, 
had hardly been borne to his grave in Westminster Abbey before 
England instinctively recognized a successor of yet greater genius in 
the victor of Marston Moor. Born in the closing years of EHzabeth's 
reign, the child of a cadet of the great house of the Cromwells of 
Hinchinbrook, and connected through his mother with Hampden and 
St. John, Oliver had been recalled by his father's death from a short 
stay at Cambridge to the little family estate at Huntingdon, which he 
quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have already seen his mood during 
the years of Tyranny, as he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness" 
amidst fancies of coming death, the melancholy which formed the 
ground of his nature feeding itself on the inaction of the time. But his 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



537 



energy made itself felt the moment the Tyranny was over. His 
father had sat, with three of his uncles, in the later Parliaments of 
EHzabeth. Oliver had himself been returned to that of 1628, and the 
town of Cambridge sent him as its representative to the Short Parlia- 
ment as to the Long. It is in the latter that a courtier, Sir Philip War- 
wick, gives us our first glimpse of his actual appearance. " I came into 
the House one morning, well clad, and perceived a gentleman speaking 
whom I knew not, veiy ordinarily apparelled, for it was a plain cloth- 
suit, which seemed to have been made by an ill country tailor. His 
linen was plain, and not very clean ; and I remember a speck or two of 
blood upon his little band, which was not much larger than his collar. 
His hat was without a hat-band. His stature was of a good size ; his 
sword stuck close to his side ; his countenance swoln and reddish ; 
his voice sharp and untuneable, and his eloquence full of fervour." He 
was already " much hearkened unto," but his power was to assert itself 
in deeds rather than in words. He appeared at the head of a troop of 
his own raising at Edgehill ; but with the eye of a born soldier he at 
once saw the blot in the army of Essex. ^' A set of poor tapsters and 
town apprentices,^^ he warned Hampden, "would never fight against men 
of honour ; " and he pointed to religious enthusiasm as the one weapon 
which could meet and turn the chivalry of the Cavalier. Even to 
Hampden the plan seemed impracticable ; but the regim^ent of a 
thousand men which Cromwell raised for the Association of the 
I Eastern Counties, and which soon became known as his Ironsides, was 
I formed strictly of " men of rehgion.^' He spent his fortune freely on 
! the task he set himself. " The business .... hath had of me in money 
; between eleven and twelve hundred pounds, therefore my private 
I estate can do little to help the public. ... I have little m.oney of my 
j own (left) to help my soldiers." But they were " a lovely company," he 
j tells his friends with soldierly pride. No blasphemy, drinking, disorder, 
I or impiety were suffered in their ranks. " Not a man swears but he 
I pays his twelve pence.^^ Nor was his choice of "men of religion " the 
only innovation' Cromwell introduced into his new regiment. The 
1 social traditions w^hich restricted command to men of birth were dis- 
' Vegarded. " It may be," he wrote, in answer to complaints from the 
j committee of the Association^ "it provokes your spirit to see such plain 
men made captains of horse. It had been w^ell that men of honour 
and birth had entered into their employments ; but w^hy do they not 
appear 1 But seeing it is necessary the work must go on, better plain 
• men than none : but best to have men patient of wants, faithful and 
j conscientious in their employment, and such, I hope, these will 
\ approve themselves." The words paint Cromwell's temper accurately 
j enough : he is far more of the practical soldier than of the theological 
\ reformer ; though his genius already breaks in upon his aristocratic 
I and conservative sympathies, and catches glimpses of the social 



538 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



revolution to which the war was drifting. " I had rather/' he once burst 
out impatiently, " have a plain russet-coated captain, that knows what 
he fights for and loves what he knows, than what you call a gentleman, 
and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed ! " he ends 
with a characteristic return to his more common mood of feeling. 
The same practical temper broke out in an innovation which had more 
immediate results. Bitter as had been his hatred of the bishops, and 
strenuously as he had worked to bring about a change in Church 
government, Cromwell, like most of the Parliamentary leaders, seems 
to have been content with the new Presbyterianism, and the Presbyte- 
rians were more than content with him. Lord Manchester " suffered 
him to guide the army at his pleasure." " The man, Cromwell," writes 
the Scotchman Baillie, " is a very wise and active head, universally 
well beloved as religious and stout." But against dissidents from 
their own system, the Presbyterians were as bitter as Laud himself ; 
and, as we shall see. Nonconformity was now rising every day 
into larger proportions, while the new claim of liberty of worship 
was becoming one of the problems of the time. Cromwell met the 
problem in his unspeculative fashion. He wanted good soldiers and 
good men ; and, if they were these, the Independent, the Baptist, 
the Leveller, found entry among his Ironsides. " You would respect 
them, did you see them," he answered the panic-stricken Presby- 
terians who charged them with "Anabaptistry" and revolutionary 
aims : " they are no Anabaptists : they are honest, sober Christians ; 
they expect to be used as men." He was soon to be driven — as in the 
social change we noticed before — to a far larger and grander point of 
view. " The State," he boldly laid down at last, " in choosing men to 
serve it, takes no notice of their opinions. If they be willing faithfully 
to serve it, that satisfies." But as yet he was busier with his new 
regiment than with theories ; and the Ironsides were no sooner in 
action than they proved themselves such soldiers as the war had never 
seen yet. " Truly they were never beaten at all," their leader said 
proudly at its close. At Winceby fight they charged " singing psalms," 
cleared Lincolnshire of the Cavendishes, and freed the eastern counties 
from all danger from Newcastle's part. At Marston Moor they faced 
and routed Rupert's chivalry. At Newbury it was only Manchester's 
reluctance that hindered them from completing the ruin of Charles. 

Cromwell had shown his capacity for organization in the creation 
of the Ironsides ; his military genius had displayed itself at Marston ; 
Moor. Newbury first raised him into a political leader. " Without a 
more speedy, vigorous, and effective prosecution of the war," he said : 
to the Commons after his quarrel with Manchester, " casting off all 
lingering proceedings, like those of soldiers of fortune beyond sea to 
spin out a war, we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the ^ 
name of a Parhament." But under the leaders who at present cou- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



539 



ducted it a vigorous conduct of the war was hopeless. They were, in 
Cromwell's plain words, "afraid to conquer.'' They desired not to 
crush Charles, but to force him back, with as much of his old strength 
remaining as might be, to the position of a constitutional King. The 
old lo3^alty, too, clogged their enterprise ; they shrank from the taint 
of treason. " If the King be beaten," Manchester urged at Newbury, 
" he will still be king ; if he beat us he will hang us all for traitors." To 
a mood like this Cromwell's reply seemed horrible. " If I met the 
King in battle I v/ould fire m.y pistol at the King as at another." The 
army, too, as he long ago urged at Edgehill, was not an army to 
conquer with. Now, as then, he urged that till the whole force was 
new modelled, and placed under a stricter discipline, " they must not 
expect any notable success in anything they went about." But the 
first step in such a re-organization must be a change of officers. The 
army was led and officered by members of the two Houses, and the 
Self-renouncing Ordinance, which was introduced by Cromwell and 
Vane, declared the tenure of military or civil offices incompatible with 
•a seat in either. In spite of a long and bitter resistance, which was 
justified at a later time by the political results which followed this 
rupture of the tie which had hitherto bound the Army to the Parlia- 
ment, the drift of public opinion was too strong to be withstood. The 
passage of the Ordinance brought about the retirement of Essex, 
Manchester, and Waller ; and the new organization of the army went 
rapidly on under a new commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas Fairfax, the 
hero of the long contest in Yorkshire, and who had been raised into 
fame by his victory at Nantwich, and his bravery at Marstcn Moor. 
The principles on which Cromwell had formed his Ironsides were 
carried out on a larger scale in the " New Model." The one aim 
was to get together twenty thousand "honest" men. "'Be careful," 
Cromwell wrote, "what captains of horse you choose, what men be 
mounted. A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose 
godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow 
them." The result was a curious medley of men of different ranks 
among the officers of the New Model. The bulk of those in high com- 
mand remained men of noble or gentle blood, Montagues, Pickerings, 
P'ortescues, Sheffields, Sidneys, and the like. But side by side with 
these, though in far smaller proportion, were seen officers like Ewer, 
who had .been a serving-man, like Okey, who had been a drayman, or 
Rainsborough, who had been a " skipper at sea." Equally strange was 
the mixture of religions in its ranks. A clause in the Act for new model- 
ling the army had enabled Fairfax to dispense with the signature of 
the Covenant in the case of " godly men ; " and among the farmers from 
the eastern counties, who formed the bulk of its privates, dissidence 
of every type had gained a firm foothold. A result hardly less notable, 
though less foreseen, was the youth of the officers. Among those in 



540 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



high command there were few who, Hke Cromwell, had passed middle 
age. Fairfax was but thirty-three, and most of his colonels were even 
younger. Of the political aspect of the New Model we shall have to 
speak at a later time ; but as yet its energy was directed solely to " the 
speedy and vigorous prosecution of the war.'' The efforts of the peace 
party were frustrated at the very moment when Fairfax was ready for 
action by the policy of the King. From the moment when Newbury 
marked the breach between the peace and war parties in the Parha- 
ment, the Scotch Commissioners had been backed by the former in 
pressing for fresh negotiations with Charles. These were opened at 
Uxbridge, and prolonged for six months ; but the hopes of concession 
which Charles had held out through the winter were suddenly with- 
drawn in the spring. He saw, as he thought, the Parliamentary army 
dissolved and ruined by the new modelling, at the instant when news 
came from Scotland of fresh successes on the part of Montrose, and 
of his overthrow of the Marquis of Argyle's troops in the victory of 
Inverlochy. " Before the end of the summer ,'' wrote the conqueror, 
" I shall be in a position to come to your Majesty's aid with a brave 
army.'' The negotiations at Uxbridge were at once broken off, and a 
few months later the King opened his campaign by a march to the 
north where he hoped to form a junction with Montrose. Leicester was 
stormed, the blockade of Chester raised, and the eastern counties threat- 
ened, until Fairfax, who had hoped to draw Charles back again by 
a blockade of Oxford, hurried at last on his track. Cromwell, who had 
been suffered by the House to retain his command for a few days, 
joined Fairfax as he drew near the King, and his arrival was greeted 
by loud shouts of welcome from the troops. The two armies met near 
Naseby, to the north-west of Northampton. The King was eager to 
fight. " Never have my affairs been in as good a state," he cried ; 
and Prince Rupert was as impatient as his uncle. On the other 
side, even Cromwell doubted the success of the new experiment., 
" I can say this of Naseby," he wrote soon after, " that when I saw 
the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a 
company of poor ignorant men, to seek to order our battle, the 
general having commanded me to order all the horse, I could not, 
riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in 
assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not bring 
to nought things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God 
did it." The battle began with a furious charge of Rupert uphill, 
v/hich routed the wing opposed to him under Ireton ; while the 
Royalist foot, after a single discharge, clubbed their muskets and fell 
on the centre under Fairfax so hotly that it slowly and stubbornly gave 
way. But the Ironsides were conquerors on the left. A single charge 
broke the northern horse under Langdale, who had already fled before 
them at Marston Moor ; and holding his troops firmly in hand, Crom- 



VIIT.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



541 



well fell with them on the flank of the Royalist foot in the very crisis 
of its success. A panic of the Royal reserve, and its flight from the 
field, aided his efforts : it was in vain that Rupert returned with forces 
exhausted by pursuit, that Charles, in a passion of despair, called on 
his troopers for " one charge more/' The battle v/as over : artillery, 
baggage, even the Royal papers, fell into the conquerors' hands : five 
thousand men surrendered ; only two thousand followed the King in 
his headlong flight upon the west. The war was ended at a blow. 
"While Charles wandered helplessly in search of fresh forces, Fairfax 
marched rapidly into Somersetshire, routed the Royal forces at Lang- 
port, and in three weeks was master of the west. A victory at Kilsyth, 
which gave Scotland for the moment to Montrose, threw a transient 
gleam over the darkening fortunes of his master's cause ; but the surren- 
der of Bristol, and the dispersion of the last force Charles could collect 
in an attempt to relieve Chester, was follov^red by news of the crushing 
and irretrievable defeat of the " Great Marquis " at Philiphaugh. In 
the wreck of the Royal cause we may pause for a moment over an 
incident which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. 
Cromwell " spent much time with God in prayer before the storm " of 
Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester had held stoutly out 
through the war for the King. The storm ended its resistance, and 
the brave old Royalist was brought in a prisoner with his house flaming 
around him. He "broke out,'' reports a Puritan bystander, "and 
said, * that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing 
House he would adventure it as he did, and so maintain it to the 
uttermost,' comforting himself in this matter * that Basing House was 
called Loyalty.'" Of loyalty such as this Charles was utterly unworthy. 
The seizure of his papers at Naseby had hardly disclosed his intrigues 
with the Irish Catholics when the Parliament was able to reveal to 
England a fresh treaty with them, which purchased no longer their 
neutrality, but their aid, by the simple concession of every demand 
they had made. The shame w^as without profit, for whatever aid 
Ireland might have given came too late to be of service. The spring 
of the following year saw the few troops who still clung to Charles 
surrounded and routed at Stow. " You have done your work now,'^ 
their leader. Sir Jacob Astley, said bitterly to his conquerors, " and 
may go to play, unless you fall out among yourselves." 



542 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Section VIII.— The Army and the Parliament. 1646—1649. 

^^Authorities . — Mainly as before, though Clarendon, invaluable during the 
progress of the war, is of little value here, and Cromwell's letters become, 
unfortunately, few at the moment when we most need their aid. On the other 
hand, Ludlow and Whitelock, as well as the passionate and unscrupulous 
*' Memoirs " of Holies and Major Hutchinson, become of much importance. 
For Charles himself, we have Sir Thomas Herbert's " Memoirs " of the last 
two years of this reign. Burnet's *' Lives of the Hamiltons" throw a good 
deal of light on Scotch affairs at this time, and Sir James Turner's ** Memoirs" 
on the Scotch invasion. The early history of the Independents, and of the 
principle of religious freedom, is well told by Mr. Masson ("Life of Milton," 
vol. iii. ).] 



With the close of the Civil War we enter on a short period of 
confused struggles, tedious and uninteresting in its outer details, but 
of far higher interest than even the War itself in its bearing on our 
after history. I Modern England, the England among whose thoughts 
and sentiments we actually live, began with the triumph of Naseby. 
Old things passed suddenly away. [When Astley gave up his sword 
the." work" of the generations whicfiliad struggled for Protestantism 
against Catholicism, for public liberty against absolute rule, in his own 
emphatic phrase, was '' done." ': So far as these contests were concerned; 
however the later Stuarts nitght strive to revive them, England could 
safely " go to play." But wdth the end of this older work a new work 
at once began. The constitutional and ecclesiastical problems which 
still in one shape or another beset us started to the front as subjects 
of national debate in the years between the close of the Civil War and 
the death of the King. The two great parties which have ever since 
divided the social, the political, and the religious life of England, 
whether as Independents and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tories, or 
as Conservatives and Liberals, sprang into organized existence in the 
contest between the Army and the Parliament. Then for the first 
time began the struggle between political tradition and political 
progress, between the principle of religious conformity and the prin- 
ciple of religious freedom, which is far from having ended yet. 

It was the religious struggle which drew the political in its train. 
W^e have already witnessed the rise under Elizabeth of sects who did not 
aim, like the Presbyterians, at a change in Church government, but re- 
jected the notion of a national Church at all, and insisted on the right 
of each congregation to perfect independence of faith and worship. 
At the close of the Queen's reign, however, these "Brownists," as they 
were called from one Brown, a clergyman who maintained their tenets, 
had almost entirely disappeared. Some, as we saw in the notable 
instance of the congregation which produced the Pilgrim Fathers, had 
found a refuge in Holland, but the bulk had been driven to a fresh con- 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



543 



formity with the Estabhshed Church. "As for those which we call 
Brownists," says Bacon, " being when they were at the best a very 
small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners 
dispersed, they are now (thanks be to God) by the good remedies that 
have been used, suppressed and worn out so as there is scarce any 
news of them/' As soon, however, as Abbot's primacy promised a 
milder rule, the Separatist refugees began to venture timidly back 
again to England. During their exile in Holland the main body, 
under Robinson, had contented themselves with the free development 
of their system of independent congregations, each forming in itself 
a complete Church, and to them the name of Independents at a later 
time attached itself. A small part, however, had drifted into a 
more marked severance in doctrine from the Established Church, 
especiall)* in their behef of the necessity of adult baptism, a belief from |\ 
which their obscure congregation at Leyden became known as thatjf 
of the Baptists. Both of these sects gathered a church in London 1 
in the middle of James's reign, but the persecuting zeal of Laud i 
prevented any spread of their opinions under that of his sue- i 
cessor ; and it was not till their numbers were suddenly increased by 
the return of a host of emigrants from New England, with Hugh 
Peters at their head, on the opening of the Long Parliament, that 
the Congregational or Independent body began to attract attention. 
Lilburne and Burton soon declared themselves adherents of what j 
was called " the New England way ; " and a year later saw in London | 
alone the rise of " four score congregations of several sectaries," as i 
Bishop Hall scornfully tells us, " instructed by guides fit for them, 
cobblers, tailors, felt-makers, and such-like trash." But little religious 
weight however could be attributed as yet to the Congregational move- 
ment. Baxter at this time had not heard of the existence of any Inde- 
pendents. Milton in his earlier pamphlets shows no sign of their influ- 
I ence. Of the hundred and five ministers present in the Westminster 
i Assembly only five were Congregational in sympathy, and these were 
I all returned refugees from Holland. Among the one hundred and 
I twenty London ministers in 1643, only three were suspected of lean- 
I ings towards the Sectaries. 

1 The struggle with Charles in fact at its outset only threw new 
I difficulties in the way of religious freedom. It was with strictly conser- 
I vative aims in ecclesiastical as in political matters that Pym and his 
I colleagues began the strife. Their avowed purpose was simply to 
I restore the Church of England to its state under Elizabeth, and to 
j free it from " innovations,'' from the changes introduced by Laud and 
I his fellow prelates. The great majority of the Parliament were averse to 
I any alterations in the constitution or doctrine of the Church itself; and it 
j was only the refusal of the bishops to accept any diminution of their 
I power and revenues, the growth of a party hostile to Episcopalian 



/ 



5'H 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



-Ir- 



Government, the necessity for purchasing the aid of the Scots by 
a union in rehgion as in poHtics, and above all the urgent need of 
constructing some new ecclesiastical organization in the place of 
the older organization which had become impossible from the Royalist 
attitude of the bishops, that forced on the two Houses the adoption 
of the Covenant. But the change to a Presbyterian system of 
Church government seemed at that time of little import to the bulk 
of Englishmen. The Laudian dogma of the necessity of bishops 
was held by few ; and the change was generally regarded with approval 
as one which brought the Church of England nearer to that of Scot- 
land, and to the reformed Churches of the continent. But what- 
ever might be the change in its administration, no one imagined 
that it had ceased to be the Church of England. The Tudor theory 
of its relation to the State, of its right to embrace all Englishmen 
within its pale, and to dictate what should be their faith and form of 
worship, remained utterly unquestioned by any man of note. The 
sentiments on which such a theory rested indeed for its main support, 
the power of historical tradition, the association of " dissidence " with 
danger to the state, the strong EngHsh instinct of order, the as strong 
Enghsh dislike of " innovations," with the abhorrence of " indiffer- 
ency," as a sign of luke-warmness in matters of religion, had only 
been intensified by the earher incidents of the struggle with the King. 
The Parliament therefore had steadily pressed on the new systern of 
ecclesiastical government in the midst of the troubles of the war. JAn 
Assembly of Divines assembled at Westminster received orders 
to revise the Articles, to draw up a Confession of Faith, and a Direc- 
tory of Public Worship, and these, with their scheme of Church 
government, a scheme only distinguished from that of Scotland by 
the significant addition of a lay court of superior appeal set by Par- 
liament over the whole system of Church courts and assemblies, were 
accepted by the Houses and embodied in a series of Ordinances. 

Had the change been made at the moment when "with uplifted 
hands" the Commons swore to the Covenant in St. Margaret's it 
would probably have been accepted by the country at large. But it 
met with a very different welcome w^hen it came at the end of the 
war. In spite of repeated votes of Parliament for its establishment, 
the pure Presbyterian system took root only in London and Lancashire. 
While the Divines, indeed, were drawing up their platform of uniform 
belief and worship in the Jerusalem Chamber dissidence had grown 
into a religious power. In the terrible agony of the long struggle 
against Charles, individual conviction became a stronger force than 
religious tradition. Theological speculation took an unprecedented 
boldness from the temper of the times. Four years after the war had 
begun a horror-stricken pamphleteer numbered sixteen religious sects 
as existing in defiance o.f the law ; and^ widely as these bodies differed 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



545 



among themselves, all at one in repudiating any right of control in faith 
or worship by the Church or its clergy. Milton, who had left his 
Presbyterian stand-point, saw at last that " new Presbyter is but old 

. Priest writ large." The question of sectarianism soon grew into a 
practical one from its bearing on the war : for the class specially 
infected with the new spirit of religious freedom was just the class to 
whose zeal and vigour the Parliament was forced to look for success 
,in its struggle. We have seen the prevalence of this spirit among the 
farmers from whom Cromwell drew his Ironsides, and his enlistment of 
these " sectaries " was the first direct breach in the old system of con- 
formity. Cromwell had signed the Covenant, and there is no reason 
for crediting him with any aversion to Presbyterianism as a system o{ 
doctrine or of Church organization. His first step, indeed, was a purely 
practical one, a step dictated by military necessities, and excused in 
his mind by a sympathy with " honest " men, as well as by the growing 
but still vague notion of a communion among Christians wider than 
that of outer conformity in worship or belief. But the alarm and 
remonstrances of the Presbyterians forced his mind rapidly forward. 
" The State in choosing men to serve it,'^ Cromwell wrote before Marston 
Moor, "takes no notice of their opinions. If they be wilhng faith- 
fully to serve it, that satisfies." Marston Moor encouraged him to 

'. press on the Parliament the necessity of at least " tolerating '' dissi- 
dents, and he succeeded in procuring the appointment of a committee 
to find some means of effecting this. But the conservative temper 
of the Presbyterian Churchmen was fairly louscd by his act, and by the 
growth of sectarianism. "We detest and abhor," wrote the London 
clergy in 1645, " ^^ much endeavoured Toleration." The corporation of 
London petitioned Parliament to suppress " all sects without tolera- 
tion." The Parliament itself was steadily on the conservative side, but 
the fortunes of the war told as steadily against conservatism. Essex 
and the Presbyterians marched from defeat to defeat. It was necessary 
to new mxodel the army, and to raise the New Model it was found 
necessary to give Fairfax power to dispense with any signatures to 
the Covenant. The victory of Naseby raised a far wider question than 
that of mere toleration. " Honest men served you faithfully in this 
action," Cromwell wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons 
from the very field. " Sir, they are trusty : I beseech you in the name 
of God not to discourage them. He that ventures his Hfe for the 
liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his con- 
science." The storm of Bristol encouraged him to proclaim the new 
principles yet more distinctly. " Presbyterians, Independents, all here 
have the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and 
answer. They agree here, have no names of difference ; pity it is it 
should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity, 
which is the most glorious, being the inward and spiritual, in the 

N N 



546 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



body and in the head. For being united in forms (commonly called 
uniformity), eveiy Christian will for peace' sake study and do as far 
as conscience will permit. And from brethren in things of the mind 
we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason." 

The increasing firmness of CromwelFs language was due to the 
growing irritation of his Presbyterian opponents. The two parties 
became every day more clearly defined. The Presbyterian ministers 
complained bitterly of the increase of the sectaries, and denounced the 
existing toleration. Scotland, whose army was still before Newark, 
pressed for the execution of the Covenant and the universal enforce- 
ment of a Presbyterian uniformity. Sir Harry Vane, on the other hand, 
was striving to bring the Parliament round to less rigid courses by the 
introduction of two hundred and thirty new members, who filled the 
seats left vacant by Royalist secessions, and the more eminent of^ 
whom, such as Ireton and Algernon Sidney, were inclined to the Inde- 
pendents. The pressure of the New Model, and the remonstrances oil 
Cromwell as its mouthpiece, hindered any effective movement towards! 
persecution. Amidst the wreck of his fortunes Charles intrigued busily I 
with both parties, and promised liberty of worship to Vane and thel 
Independents, at the moment when he was negotiating for a refuge with ' 
the Presbyterian Scots. His negotiations were quickened by the march 
of I^airfax upon Oxford. Driven from his last refuge, the King after 
some aimless wanderings made his appearance in the camp of the Scots. 
Lord Leven at once fell back with his Royal prize on Newcastle. The 
new aspect of affairs threatened the party of religious freedom with 
ruin. Hated as they were, by the Scots, by the Lords, by the city of 
London, the apparent junction of Charles with their enemies destroyed 
their growing hopes in the Commons, where the prospects of a speedy 
peace on Presbyterian terms at once swelled the majority of their 
opponents. The two Houses laid their conditions of peace before the 
King without a dream of resistance from one who seemed to have placed 
himself at their mercy. They required for the Parliament the command 
of the army and fleet for twenty years ; the exclusion of all ^^ Malignants," 
or Royalists who had taken part in the war, from civil and military 
office ; the abolition of Episcopacy ; and the establishment of a 
Presbyterian Church. Of toleration or liberty of conscience they said 
not a word. The Scots pressed these terms on the King " with tears ; " 
his Royahst friends, and even the Queen, urged their acceptance. But 
the aim of Charles was simply delay. Time and the dissensions of his 
enemies, as he believed, were fighting for him. " I am not without hope,'' 
he wrote coolly, " that I shall be able to draw either the Presbyterians 
or the Independents to side with me for extirpating one another, so 
that I shall be really King again." His refusal of the terms offered 
by the Houses was a defeat for the Presbyterians. "What will 
become of us," asked one of them, " now that the King has rejected our 



VIII.J 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



rAl 



proposals ? " " What would have become of us," retorted an Inde- 
pendent, " had he accepted them ? " The vigour of Holies and the 
Conservative leaders in the Parliament rallied however to a bolder 
effort. While the Scotch army lay at Newcastle they could not insist 
on dismissing their own. But the withdrawal of the Scots from 
England would not only place the King^s person in the hands of the 
Houses, but enable them to free themselves from the pressure of their 
own soldiers by disbanding the New Model. Hopeless of success with 
the King, and unable to bring him into Scotland in face of the refusal 
of the General Assembly to receive a sovereign who would not swear 
to the Covenant, the Scottish army accepted ^400,000 in discharge of 
its claims, handed Charles over to a committee of the Houses, and 
marched back over the Border. Masters of the King, the Presbyterian 
leaders at once moved boldly to their attack on the Sectaries. They 
voted that the army should be disbanded, and that a new army should 
be raised for the suppression of the Irish rebellion with strictly Pres- 
byterian officers at its head. It was in vain that the men protested 
against being severed from ^* officers that we love," and that the Council 
of Officers strove to gain time by pressing on the Parliament the danger 
of mutiny. Holies and his fellow leaders were resolute, and their 
ecclesiastical legislation showed the end at which their resolution 
aimed. Direct enforcement of conformity was impossible till the New 
Model was disbanded ; but the Parliament pressed on in the work of 
providing the machinery for enforcing it as soon as the army was 
gone. Vote after vote ordered the setting up of Presbyteries through- 
out the country, and the first fruits of these efforts were seen in the 
Presbyterian organization of London, and in the first meeting of 
its Synod at St. Paul's. Even the officers on Fairfax's staff" v/ere 
ordered to take the Covenant. 

All hung however on the disbanding of the New Model, and the 
New Model showed no will to disband itself. Its new attitude can 
only fairly be judged by remembering what the conquerors of Naseby 
really were. They were soldiers of a different class and of a different 
temper from the soldiers of any other army that the world has seen. 
Their ranks were filled for the most part with young farmers and trades- 
men of the lower sort, maintaining themselves, for their pay was 
twelvemonths in arrear, mainly at their own cost. They had been 
specially picked as " honest," or religious men, and, whatever 
enthusiasm or fanaticism they may have shown, their very enemies 
acknowledged the order and piety of their camp. They looked on 
themselves not as sworasmen, to be caught up and flung away 
at the will of a paymaster, but as men who had left fann and 
merchandise at a direct call from God. A great work had been given 
them to do, and the call bound them till it was done. Kingcraft, 
as Charles was hoping, might yet restore tyranny to the throne. A 

N N 2 



54S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



The Armv 

AND 

THE Par- 
liament, 
1646- 
1649. 



\ 



yune. 1647. 



Sac. VIII. more immediate danger threatened that liberty of conscience which 
was to them " the ground of the quarrel, and for which so many of 
their friends' lives had been lost, and so much of their own blood has 
been spilt." They would wait before disbanding till these liberties were 
secured, and if need came they would again act to secure them. But 
their resolve sprang from no pride in the brute force of the sword they 
wielded. On the contrary, as they pleaded passionately at the bar of 
the Commons, " on becoming soldiers we have not ceased to be 
citizens." Their aims and proposals throughout were purely those of 
citizens, and of citizens who were ready the moment their aim was 
won to return peacefully to their homes. Thought and discussion had 
turned the army into a vast Parliament, a ParHament which regarded 
itself as the representatives of " godly " men in as high a degree as the 
Parliament at Westminster, and which must have become every day 
more .conscious of its superiority in political capacity to its rival. 
Ireton, the moving spirit of the New Model, had no equal as a states- 
man in St. Stephen's : nor is it possible to compare the large and far- 
sighted proposals of the army with the blind and narrow policy of the 
two Houses. Whatever we may think of the means by which the New 
Model sought its aims, we must in justice remember that, so far as 
those aims went, the New Model was in the right. For the last two 
/ hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out 
I in a slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious 
I reform which the army propounded at the close of the Civil War. 



It was not till the rejection of the officers' proposals had left little hope 
of conciliation that the army acted, but its action was quick and 
decisive. It set aside for all political purposes the Council of Officers, 
and elected a new Council of Adjutators or Assistants, two members 
being named by each regiment, which summoned a general meeting of 
the army at Triploe Heath, where the proposals of pay and disbanding 
made by the Parliament were rejected with cries of "Justice." While 
the army was gathering, in fact, the Adjutators had taken a step which 
put submission out of the question. A rumour that the King was to 
iDe removed to London, a new army raised, a new civil war begun, 
roused the soldiers to madness. Five hundred troopers suddenly 
appeared before Holmby House, where the King was residing in 
charge of the Parliamentary Commissioners, and displaced its guards. 
"Where is your commission for this act?" Charles asked the cornet 
who commanded them. " It is behind me," said Joyce, pointing to 
his soldiers. " It is written in very fine and legible characters," laughed 
the King. The seizure had in fact been previously concerted between 
Charles and the Adjutators. " I will part willingly," he told Joyce, " if 
the soldiers confirm all that you have promised me. You will exact 
from me nothing that off'ends my conscience or my honour." " It is 
not our maxim," replied the cornet, " to constrain the conscience of , 






VIII. ] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



549 



anyone, still less that of our King." After a first burst of terror at 
the news, the Parliament fell furiously on Cromwell, who had relin- 
quished his command and quitted the army before the close of the 
war, and had ever since been employed as a mediator between the two 
plarties. The charge of having incited the mutiny fell before his 
vehement protest, but he was driven to seek refuge with the army, and 
in three days it was in full march upon London. Its demands were 
expressed with perfect clearness in an "Humble Representation" 
which it addressed to the Houses. " We desire a settlement of the 
Peace of the kingdom and of the liberties of the subject according 
to the votes and declarations of Parliament. We desire no alteration 
in the civil government : as little do we desire to interrupt or in the 
least to intermeddle with the settling of the Presbyterial governmient." 
They demanded toleration ; but " not to open a way to licentious living 
under pretence of obtaining ease for tender consciences, we profess, as 
ever, in these things when the state has made a settlement we have 
nothing to say, but to submit or suffer." It was with a view to such 
a settlement that they demanded the expulsion of eleven members 
from the Commons, with Holies at their head, v/hom the soldiers 
charged with stirring up strife between the army and the Parliament, 
and with a design of renewing the civil war. After fruitless negotia- 
tions the terror of the Londoners forced the eleven to withdraw ; 
and the Houses named Commissioners to treat on the questions 
at issue. 

Though Fairfax and Cromwell had at last been forced from their 
position as mediators into a hearty co-opera.tion with the army, its 
pohtical direction rested at this moment with Cromwell's son-in-law, 
Henry Ireton, and Ireton looked for a real settlement, not to the Par- 
liament, but to the King. " There must be some difference," he urged 
bluntly, " between conquerors and conquered ; " but the terms which he 
laid before Charles were terms of studied moderation. The vindictive 
spirit which the Parhament had shown against the Royalists and the 
Church disappeared in the terms he laid before the King ; and the 
army contented itself with the banishment of seven leading " delin- 
quents," a general Act of Oblivion for the rest, the withdrawal 
of all coercive power from the clergy, the control of Parliament 
over the mihtary and naval forces for ten years, and its nomination 
of the great officers of State. Behind these demands hov/ever came 
the masterly and comprehensive plan of political reform which had 
already been sketched by the army in the '' Humble Representation," 
with which it had begun its march on London. BeHef and worship 
were to be free to all. Acts enforcing the use of the Prayer-book, or 
attendance at Church, or the enforcement of the Covenant were to be 
repealed. Even Papists, whatever other restraints might be imposed. 
were to be freed from the bondage of compulsory worship. Parlia- 



5 so 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



aL a 



[CiiAiii 

sformeJl 
ion waif 



merits were to be triennial, and the House of Commons to be reform ei 
by a fairer distribution of seats and of electoral rights ; taxation wai 
to be readjusted ; legal procedure simplified ; a crowd of political^ 
commercial, and judicial privileges abolished. Ireton believed that 
Charles could be " so managed" (says Mrs. Hutchinson) " as to comply 
with the public good of his people after he could no longer uphold his 
violent will." But Charles was equally dead to the moderation and to 
the wisdom of this great Act of Settlement. He saw in the crisis no- 
thing but an opportunity of balancing one party against another ; and 
believed that the army had more need of his aid than he of the army's. 
" You cannot do without me — ^you are lost if I do not support you," he 
said to Ireton as he pressed his proposals. " You have an intention to 
be the arbitrator between us and the Parliament," Ireton quietly replied, 
" and we mean to be so between the Parliament and your Majesty." 
But the King's tone was soon explained by a rising of the London mob 
which broke into the House of Commons, and forced its members to re- 
call the eleven. While fourteen peers and a hundred Commoners fled to 
the army, those who remained at Westminster prepared for an open 
struggle with it, and invited Charles to return to London. But the 
army was again on the march. "In two days,'' Cromwell said coolly, 
"the city will be in our hands." The soldiers entered London in 
triumph, and restored the fugitive members ; the eleven were again 
expelled, and the army leaders resumed negotiations with the King. 
The indignation of the soldiers at his delays and intrigues made the 
task hourly more difficult ; but Cromwell, who now threw his whole 
weight on Ireton's side, clung to the hope of accommodation with a 
passionate tenacity. His mind, conservative by tradition, and above 
all practical in temper, saw the political difficulties which would 
follow on the abolition of Royalty, and in spite of the King's evasions 
he persisted in negotiating with him. But Cromwell stood almost 
alone ; the ParHament refused to accept Ireton's proposals as a basis 
of peace, Charles still evaded, and the army then grew restless and sus- 
picious. There were cries for a wide reform, for the abolition of the 
House of Peers, for a new House of Commons ; and the Adjutator^ 
called on the Council of Officers to discuss the question of abohshing 
Royalty itself. Cromwell was never braver than when he faced the 
gathering storm, forbade the discussion, adjourned the Council, and sent 
the officers to their regiments. But the strain was too great to last long, 
and Charles was still resolute to " play his game." He was in fact so 
far from being in earnest in his negotiations with Cromwell and Ireton, 
that at the moment they were risking their lives for him he was conduct- 
ing another and equally delusive negotiation with the Parliament, 
fomenting the discontent in London, preparing for a fresh Royalist 
rising, and for an invasion of the Scots in his favour. "The two 
nations," he wrote joyously, " will soon be at war." All that was needed 



VITL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



551 



for the success of his schemes was his owti liberty ; and in the midst 
of his hopes of an accommodation Cromwell found with astonishment 
that he had been duped throughout, and that the King had fled. 

The flight fanned the excitement of the army into frenzy, and only 
the courage of Cromwell averted an open mutiny in its gathering at 
Ware. But even Cromwell was powerless to break the spirit which 
now pervaded the soldiers, and the King's perfidy left him without 
resource. " The King is a man of great parts and great understand- 
ing/' he said at last, " but so great a dissembler and so false a man 
that he is not to be trusted." By a strange error Charles had made his 
way from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, perhaps with some hope 
from the sympathy of Colonel Hammond, the Governor of Carisbrook 
Castle, and again found himself a prisoner. Foiled in his effort to put 
himself at the head of the new civil war, he set himself to organize 
it from his prison ; and while again opening delusive negotiations 
with the Parliament, he signed a secret treaty with the Scots for the 
invasion of the realm. The rise of Independency, and the practical 
suspension of the Covenant, had produced a violent reaction in his 
favour north of the Tweed. The nobles gathered round the Duke 
of Hamilton, and carried the elections against Argyle and the adhe- 
rents of the Parliament ; and on the King's consenting to a stipulation 
for the re-establishment of Presbytery in England, they ordered an 
army to be levied for his support. In England the whole of the con- 
servative party, with many of the most conspicuous members of the 
Long Parliament at its head, was drifting, in its horror of the religious 
and political changes which seemed impending, towards the King; and 
the news from Scotland gave the signal for fitful insurrections in 
almost every quarter. London was only held down by main force, 
old officers of the Parliament unfurled the Royal flag in South Wales, 
and surprised Pembroke. The seizure of Berwick and Carlisle opened 
a way for the Scotch invasion. Kent, Essex, and Hertford broke 
out in revolt. The fleet in the Downs sent their captains on shore, 
hoisted the King's pennon, and blockaded the Thames. " The hour 
is come for the Parliament to save the kingdom and to govern alone,'' 
cried Cromwell ; but the Parliament only showed itself eager to take 
advantage of the crisis to profess its adherence to Royalty, to re-open 
the negotiations it had broken off with the King, and to deal the 
fiercest blow at religious freedom which it had ever received. The 
Presbyterians flocked back to their seats ; and an " Ordinance for the 
suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies," which Vane and Cromwell 
had long held at bay, was passed by triumphant majorities. Any 
man — runs this terrible statute— denying the doctrine of the Trinity 
or of the Divinity of Christ, or that the books of Scripture are not 
*' the Word of God,'' or the resurrection of the body, or a future 
day of judgment, and refusing on trial to abjure his heresy, " shall 



Skc. viir. 

The Armv 

AND 

THE Par- 
liament. 

164.9. 

Tlie 

Second 

Civil 

War. 



552 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



suffer the pain of death," Any man declaring (amidst a long list of 
other errors) "that man by nature hath free will to turn to God," 
that there is a Purgatory, that images are lawful, that infant baptism 
is unlawful ; any one denying the obligation of observing the Lord's 
day, or asserting " that the Church government by Presbytery is 
anti- Christian or unlawful," shall on a refusal to renounce his errors 
" be commanded to prison." It was plain that the Presbyterian party 
counted on the King's success to resume its policy of conformity, 
and had Charles been free, or the New Model disbanded, its hopes 
would probably have been realized. But Charles, though eager to 
escape, was still safe at Carisbrook ; and the New Model was facing 
fiercely the danger which surrounded it. The wanton renewal of the war 
at a moment when all tended to peace swept from the mind of Fairfax 
and Cromwell, as from that of the army at large, every thought of 
reconciliation with the King. Soldiers and generals were at last bound 
together again in a stern resolve. On the eve of their march against 
the revolt all gathered in a solemn prayer-meeting, and came " to 
a very clear and joint resolution, ' That it was our duty, if ever the 
Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man 
of blood, to account for the blood he has shed and mischief he has 
done to his utmost against the Lord's cause and people in this poor 
nation.' " In three days Fairfax had trampled out the Kentish insur- 
rection^ and had prisoned that of the eastern counties within the walls 
of Colchester, while Cromwell drove the Welsh insurgents within 
those of Pembroke. Both the towns however held stubbornly out ; and 
though a Royalist rising under Lord Holland in the neighbourhood of i 
London was easily put down, there was no force left to stem the 
inroad of the Scots, who were pouring over the Border some twenty ■ 
thousand strong. Luckily the surrender of Pembroke at the critical 
moment set Cromwell free. Pushing rapidly northward with five 
thousand men, he called in the force under Lambert which had been 
gallantly hanging on the Scottish flank, and pushed over the York- 
shire hills into the valley of the Ribble. The Duke of Hamilton, rein- 
forced by three thousand Royalists of the north, had advanced as far as 
Preston. With an army which now numbered ten thousand men, 
Cromwell poured down on the flank of the Duke's straggling line of 
march, attacked the Scots as they retired behind the Ribble, passed the 
river with them, cut their rearguard to pieces at Wigan, forced the 
defile at Warrington, where the flying enemy made a last and desperate 
stand, and forced their foot to surrender, while Lambert hunted down 
Hamilton and the horse. Fresh from its victory, the New Model pushed 
over the Border, while the peasants of Ayrshire and the west rose in 
the " Whiggamore raid " (notable as the first event in which we find 
the name "Whig," which is possibly the same as our "Whey," and 
conveys a taunt against the " sour-milk " faces of the fanatical 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



553 



Ayrshiremen), and, marching upon Edinburgh, dispersed the Royalist 
party and again installed Argyle in power. 

Argyle welcomed Cromwell as a deliverer, but the victorious general 
had hardly entered Edinburgh when he was recalled by pressing news 
from the south. The temper with which the Parliament had met the 
Royalist revolt was, as we have seen, widely different from that of the 
army. It had recalled the eleven members, and had passed the 
Ordinance against heresy. At the moment of the victory at Preston the 
Lords were discussing charges of treason against Cromwell, while com- 
missioners had again been sent to the Isle of Wight, in spite of the 
resistance of the Independents, to conclude peace with the King. 
Royahsts and Presbyterians alike pressed Charles to grasp the easy 
terms which were now offered him. But his hopes from Scotland 
had only broken down to give place to hopes of a new war with the 
aid of an army from Ireland ; and the negotiations saw forty days 
wasted in useless chicanery. " Nothing," Charles wrote to his 
friends, " is changed in my designs." But at this moment the 
surrender of Colchester and the convention with Argyle set free 
the army, and petitions from its regiments at once demanded "justice 
on the King." A fresh " Remonstrance " from the Council of 
Officers called for the election of a new Parliament ; for electoral 
reform; for the recognition of the supremacy of the Parliament "in 
ail things ; " for the change of kingship, should it be retained, into 
a magistracy elected by the Parliament, and without veto on its 
proceedings ; and demanded above all " that the capital and grand 
author of our troubles, by whose commissions, commands, and pro- 
curements, and in whose behalf and for whose interest only, of will 
and power, all our wars and troubles have been, with all the miseries 
attending them, may be specially brought to justice for the treason, 
blood, and mischief he is therein guilty of." The reply of the Parha- 
ment to this Remonstrance was to accept the King's concessions, 
unimportant as they were, as a basis of peace. The step was accepted 
by the soldiers as a defiance : Charles was again seized by a troop 
of horse, and carried off to Hurst Castle ; w^hile a letter from Fairfax 
announced the march of his army upon London. " We shall know 
now," said Vane, as the troops took their post round the Houses of 
Parliament, " who is on the side of the King, and who on the side 
of the people." But the terror of the army proved weaker among 
their memibers than the agonized loyalty which strove to save Charles, 
and an immense majority in both Houses still voted for the accept- 
ance of the terms he had offered. The next morning saw Colonel 
Pride at the door of the House of Commons with a list of forty 
members of the majority in his hands. The Council of Officers had 
resolved to exclude them., and as each member made his appearance 
he was arrested, and put in confinement. " By what right do you 



554 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



act?'' a member asked. "By the right of the sword/' Hugh Peters 
is said to have rephed. The House was still resolute, but on the 
following morning forty more members were excluded, and the 
rest gave way. The formal expulsion of one hundred and forty 
members left the Independents, who alone remained, free to co-operate 
with the army which had delivered them ; the peace votes were at 
once rescinded ; the removal of Charles to Windsor was followed by 
an instant resolution for his trial, and by the nomination of a Court 
of one hundred and fifty Commissioners to conduct it, with John 
Bradshaw, a lawyer of eminence, at their head. The rejection of this 
Ordinance by the few peers who remained brought about a fresh resolu- 
tion from the lower House, " that the People are, under God, the original 
of all just power ; that the Commons of England in Parliament 
assem*bled — being chosen by, and representing, the People — have the 
supreme power in this nation ; and that whatsoever is enacted and 
declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled hath the 
force of a law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, 
although the consent and concurrence of the King or House of Peers 
be not had thereunto." 

Charles appeared before the Court only to deny its competence and 
to refuse to plead ; but thirty-two witnesses were examined to satisfy 
the consciences of his judges, and it was not till the fifth day of the 
trial that he was condemned to death as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, 
and enemy of his country. The popular excitement had vented itself 
in cries of "Justice,^' or "God save your Majesty," as the trial went 
on, but all save the loud outcries of the soldiers was hushed as 
Charles passed to receive his doom. The dignity which he had 
failed to preserve in his long jangling with Bradshaw and the judges 
returned at the call of death. Whatever had been the faults and 
follies of his life, " he nothing common did, or mean, upon that memo- 
rable scene," Two masked executioners awaited the King as he 
mounted the scaffold, which had been erected outside one of the 
windows of the Banqueting House at Whitehall ; the streets and roofs 
were thronged with spectators ; and a strong body of soldiers stood 
drawn up beneath. His head fell at the first blow, and as the execu- 
tioner lifted it to the sight of all a groan of pity and horror burst from 
the silent crowd. 

Section IX.— The Cominonwealtli. 1649—1653. 

{^Authorities. — Rushworth's collection ceases with the King's Trial; White- 
lock and Ludlow continue as before, and must be supplemented by the Parlia- 
mentary History and the State Trials. Special lives of Vane and Martyn will 
be found in Mr. Forster's *' Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and a vigorous 
defence of the Council of State in the *^ History of the Commonwealth, ' by 
Mr. Bisset. For Irish affairs we have a vast store of materials in the Ormond 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



555 



Papers and Letters collected by Carte, to which we may add CromweH's 
despatches in Carlyle's ''Letters." The account given by Mr. Carlyle of the 
Scotch war is perhaps the most valuable portion of his work. The foreign 
politics and wars of this period are admirably illustrated with a copious 
appendix of documents by M. Guizot ("Republic and Cromwell," vol. i.), 
whose account of the whole period is the fairest and best for the general reader. 
A biography of Blake has been published by Mr. Hepworth Dixon.] 



The news of the King's death was received throughout Europe with 
a thrill of horror. The Czar of Russia chased the English envoy 
from his court. The ambassador of France was withdrawn on the 
proclamation of the Republic. The Protestant powers of the Continent 
seemed more anxious than any to disavow all connection with the 
Protestant people who had brought a King to the block. Holland took 
the lead in acts of open hostility to the new power as soon as the news 
of the execution reached the Hague ; the States-General w^aited 
solemnly on the Prince of Wales, who took the title of Charles the 
Second, and recognized him as "Majesty," while they refused an 
audience to the Enghsh envoys. Their Stadtholder, his brother-in- 
law, the Prince of Orange, was supported by popular sympathy in the 
aid and encouragement he afforded to Charles ; and the eleven ships 
of the English fleet, which had found a refuge at the Hague ever since 
their revolt from the Parliament, were suffered to sail under Rupert's 
command on an errand of sheer piracy, though with a Royal commission, 
and to render the seas unsafe for English traders. The danger, however, 
was far greater nearer home. The Scots proclaimed Charles the 
Second as their King on the news of his father's death, and at once 
despatched an embassy to the Hague to invite him to ascend the 
throne. Ormond, who had at last succeeded in uniting the countless 
factions who ever since the Rebellion had turned Ireland into a chaos, 
the old Irish Catholics or native party under Owen Roe O'Neil, the 
Catholics of the English Pale, the Episcopalian Royalists, the Presby- 
terial Royalists of the north, called on Charles to land at once in a 
country where he would find three-fourths of its people devoted to his 
cause. Nor was the danger from without met by resolution and 
energy on the part of the diminished Parliament which remained the 
sole depositary of legal powers. The Commons entered on their 
new task wdth hesitation and delay. More than a month passed after 
the King's execution before the Monarchy was formally abolished, and 
the government of the nation provided for by the creation of a Council 
of State consisting of forty-one members selected from the Commons, 
who were entrusted with full executive power at home or abroad. 
Two months more elapsed before the passing of the memorable Act 
which declared "that the People of England and of all the dominions 
and territories thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and are hereby 



556 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



constituted, made, established, and confirmed to be a Commonwealth 
and Free State, and shall henceforward be governed as a Common- 
wealth and Free State by the supreme authority of this nation, the 
Representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall 
appoint and constitute officers and ministers for the good of the people, 
and that without any King or House of Lords." 

Of the dangers which threatened the new Commonwealth some were 
more apparent than real. The rivalry of France and Spain, both 
anxious for its friendship, secured it from the hostihty of the greater 
powers of the Continent, and the ill-will of Holland could be delayed, 
if not averted, by negotiations. The acceptance of the Covenant was 
insisted on by Scotland before it would formally receive Charles as its 
ruler, and nothing but necessity would induce him to comply with 
such a demand. On the side of Ireland the danger was more pressing, 
and an army of twelve thousand men was set apart for a vigorous 
prosecution of the Irish war. The Commonwealth found considerable 
difficulties at home. The death of Charles gave fresh vigour to the 
Royalist cause, and the new loyalty was stirred to enthusiasm by the 
publication of the " Eikon Basilike,'^ a work really due to the ingenuity 
of Dr. Gauden, a Presbyterian minister, but which was believed to have 
been composed by the King himself in his later hours of captivity, and 
which reflected with admirable skill the hopes, the suffering, and the 
piety of the Royal " martyr." The dreams of a rising were roughly 
checked by the execution of the Duke of Hamilton and Lords Holland 
and Capell, who had till now been confined in the Tower. But the 
popular disaffection told even on the Council of State. A majority of 
its members declined the oath offered to them at their earliest meeting, 
pledging them to an approval of the King's death and the establish- A i 
ment of the Commonwealth. Half the judges retired from the bench, f ; 
Thousands of refusals met the demand of an engagement to be faith- 
ful to the Republic which was made from all beneficed clergymen and 
public functionaries. It was not till Ma)?-, and even then in spite of 
the ill-will of the citizens, that the Council ventured to proclaim the ,., 
Commonwealth in London. A yet more formidable peril lay in the i | 
selfishness of the Parliament itself. It was now a mere fragment of « 
the House of Commons ; the members of the Rump — as it was con- 
temptuously called — numbered hardly a hundred, and of those the 
average attendance was little more than fifty. In reducing it by 
" Pride's Purge" to the mere shadow of a House the army had never 
dreamt of its continuance as a permanent assembly : it had, in fact, 
insisted as a condition of even its temporary continuance that it should 
prepare a bill for the summoning of a fresh Parliament. The plan put 
forward by the Council of Officers is still interesting as the base of 
many later efforts towards parliamentary reform ; it advised a dis- 
solution in the spring, the assembling every two years of a new 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



557 



Parliament consisting of four hundred members, elected by all house- 
holders rateable to the poor, and a redistribution of seats which 
would have given the privilege of representation to all places of 
importance. Paid military officers and civil officials were excluded 
from election. The plan was apparently accepted by the Commons, 
and a bill based on it was again and again discussed ; but there 
was a suspicion that no serious purpose of its own dissolution was 
entertained by the House. The popular discontent at once found a 
mouthpiece in John Lilburne, a brave, hot-headed soldier, and the 
excitement of the army appeared suddenly in a formidable mutiny. 
"You must cut these people in pieces," Cromwell burst out in the Council 
of State, " or they will cut you in pieces ; " and a forced march of fifty 
miles to Burford enabled him to burst on the mutinous regiments at 
midnight; and to stamp out the revolt. But resolute as he was against 
disorder, Cromwell went honestly with the army in its demand of a 
new Parliament ; he believed, and in his harangue to the mutineers he 
pledged himself to the assertion, that the House purposed to dissolve 
itself. Within the House, however, a vigorous knot of politicians 
was resolved to prolong its existence ; and in a witty paraphrase of the 
story of Moses, Henry Martyn had already pictured the Common- 
wealth as a new-born and delicate babe, and hinted that " no one is so 
proper to bring it up as the mother who has brought it into the 
world." As yet, how^ever, their intentions were kept secret, and in spite 
of the delays thrown in the way of the bill for a new Representative 
body Cromwell entertained no serious suspicion of such a design, when 
he was summoned to Ireland by a series of Royalist successes Avhich 
left only Dublin in the hands of the Parliamentary forces. 

With Scotland threatening war, and a naval struggle impending with 
Holland, it was necessary that the work of the army in Ireland should 
be done quickly. The temper, too, of Cromwell and his soldiers was 
one of vengeance, for the horror of the Irish Massacre remained living 
in every English breast, and the revolt was looked upon as a con- 
tinuance of the Massacre. " We are come," he said on his landing, 
'^ to ask an account of the innocent blood that hath been shed, and to 
endeavour to bring to an account all w^ho by appearing in arms shall 
justify the same." A sortie from Dublin had already broken up 
Ormondes siege of the capital ; and feeling himself powerless to keep 
ihe field before the new army, the Marquess had thrown his best troops, 
three thousand Englishmen under Sir Arthur Aston, as a garrison into 
Drogheda. The storm of Drogheda was the first of a series of awful 
iTiassacres. The garrison fought bravely, and repulsed the first 
attack ; but a second drove Aston and his force back to the Mill- 
Mount. " Our men getting up to them," ran Cromwell's terrible 
despatch, " were ordered by me to put them all to the sword. And 
indeed, being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that 



S58 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH Pi^JPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. IX. I were in arms in the town, and I think that night they put to death 
about two thousand men." A few fled to St. Peter's church, " where- 
upon I ordered the steeple to be burned, where one of them was heard 
to say in the midst of the flames : ' God damn me, I burn, I burn.' " 
" In the church itself nearly one thousand were put to the sword. 
I believe all their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously but 
two," but these were the sole exceptions to the rule of killing the 
soldiers only. At a later time Cromwell challenged his enemies to 
give " an instance of one man since my coming into Ireland, not in 
arms, massacred, destroyed, or burnt." But for soldiers there was no 
mercy. Of the remnant who surrendered through hunger, "when 
they submitted, their officers were knocked on the head, every tenth 
man of the soldiers killed, and the rest shipped for the Barbadoes."' 
"I am persuaded," the despatch ends, "that this is a righteous judg- 
ment of God upon these barbarous wretches who have imbrued their 
hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to prevent the 
effusion of blood for the future." A detachment sufficed to relieve 
Derry, and to quiet Ulster ; and Cromwell turned to the south, where as 
stout a defence w^as followed by as terrible a massacre at Wexford. 
Fresh successes at Ross and Kilkenny brought him to Waterford ; but 
the city held stubbornly out, disease thinned his army, where there was 
scarce an officer who had not been sick, and the general himself was 
arrested by illness, and at last the tempestuous weather drove him 
into v/inter quarters at Cork with his work half done. The winter wa^i 
one of terrible anxiety. The Parliament showed less and less inclina- 
tion to dissolve itself, and met the growing discontent by a stricter 
censorship of the press and a fruitless prosecution of John Lilburne. 
English commerce was ruined by the piracies of Rupert's fleet, which 
now anchored at Kinsale to support the Royalist cause in Ireland. 
The energy of Vane indeed had already re-created a navy, squadrons 
were being despatched into the British seas, the Mediterranean, and 
the Levant, and Colonel Blake, who had distinguished himself by his 
heroic defence of Taunton during the war, was placed at the head of 
a fleet which drove Rupert from the Irish coast, and finally blockaded 
him in the Tagus. But even the energy of Vane quailed before the 
danger from the Scots. " One must go and die there," the young 
King cried at the news of Ormond's defeat before Dublin, " for it is 
shameful for me to live elsewhere." But his ardour for an Irish cam- 
paign cooled as Cromwell marched from victory to victory ; and from 
the isle of Jersey, which alone remained faithful to him of all his 
southern dominions, Charles renewed the negotiations with Scotland 
which his hopes from Ireland had broken. They were again delayed by 
a proposal on the part of Montrose to attack the very Government with 
whom his master was negotiating ; but the failure and death of the 
Marquis in the spring forced Charles to accept the Presbyterian con- 



11 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



559 



ditions. The news of the negotiations at Breda filled the Parliament 
with dismay, for Scotland was raising an army, and Fairfax, while 
willing to defend England against a Scotch invasion, scrupled to take 
the lead in an invasion of Scotland. The Council recalled Cromwell 
from Ireland, but his cooler head saw that there was yet time to finish 
his work in the west. During the winter he had been busily preparing 
for a new campaign, and it was only after the storm of Clonmell, 
and the overthrow of the Irish army under Hugh O'Neile in the 
hottest fight the army had yet fought, that he embarked his soldiers 
for England. 

Cromwell entered London amidst the shouts of a great multitude ; 
and a month later, as Charles landed on the shores of Scotland, the 
English army started for the north. It crossed the Tweed, fifteen thousand 
men strong ; but the terror of the Irish massacres hung round its 
leader, the country was deserted as he advanced, and he was forced to 
cling for provisions to the fleet which sailed along the coast. Leslie, 
with a larger force, refused battle and lay obstinately in his lines between 
Edinburgh and Leith ; a march of the English army round his posi- 
tion to the slopes of the Pentlands only brought about a change of the 
Scottish front ; and as Cromwell fell back baffled upon Dunbar, Leslie 
encamped upon the heights above the town, and cut off the English 
retreat along the coast by the seizure of Cockburnspath. His post was 
almost unassailable, while the soldiers of Cromwell fell fast with 
disease ; and their general had resolved on an embarcation of his 
forces, when he saw in the dusk of evening signs of movement in the 
Scottish camp. Leslie's caution had at last been overpowered by the 
zeal of the preachers, and his army moved down to the lower ground 
between the hillside on which it was encamped and a little brook 
which covered the English front. His horse was far in advance of 
the main body, and it had hardly reached the level ground when 
Cromwell in the dim dawn flung his whole force upon it. " They run, 
I profess they run ! " he cried as the Scotch horse broke after a des- 
perate resistance, and threw into confusion the foot who were hurrying to 
their aid. Then, as the sun rose over the mist of the morning, he added 
in nobler words : " Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered ! 
Like as the mist vanisheth, so shalt Thou drive them away ! " In less 
than an hour the victory was complete. The defeat at once became 
a rout ; ten thousand prisoners were taken, with all the baggage and 
guns ; three thousand were slain, with scarce any loss on the part of 
the conquerors. Leslie reached Edinburgh, a general without an 
army. The effect of Dunbar was at once seen in the attitude of the 
Continental powers. Spain hastened to recognize the Republic, and 
Holland offered its alliance. But Cromwell was watching with 
anxiety the growing discontent at home. The general amnesty 
claimed by Ireton and the bill for the Parhament's dissolution still 



56o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



hung on hand ; the reform of the courts of justice, which had been 
pressed by the army, failed before the obstacles thrown in its way 
by the lawyers in the Commons. " Relieve the oppressed," Cromwell 
wrote from Dunbar, "hear the groans of poor prisoners. Be pleased to 
reform the abuses of all professions. If there be any one that makes 
many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth." But 
the Parliament was seeking to turn the current of public opinion in 
favour of its own continuance by a great diplomatic triumph. It 
resolved secretly on the wild project of bringing about a union 
between England and Holland, and it took advantage of Cromwell's 
victory to despatch Oliver St. John with a stately embassy to the 
Hague. His rejection of the alliance and Treaty of Commerce which 
the Dutch offered were followed by the disclosure of the English 
proposal of union ; but the proposal was at once rejected. The 
envoys, who returned angrily to the Parhament, attributed their failure 
to the posture of affairs in Scotland, where Charles was preparing for 
a new campaign. " I believe the King will set up on his own score 
now," Cromwell had written after Dunbar. Plumiliation after humilia- 
tion had been heaped on Charles since he landed in his northern 
realm. He had subscribed to the Covenant ; he had listened to 
sermons and scoldings from the ministers ; he had been called on to 
sign a declaration that acknowledged the tyranny of his father and 
the idolatry of his mother. Hardened and shameless as he was, the 
young King for a moment recoiled. " I could never look my mother 
in the face again," he cried, " after signing such a paper ; " but he 
signed. He was still, however, a King only in name, shut out from the 
Council and the army, with his friends excluded from all part in govern- 
ment or the war. But he was at once freed by the victory of Dunbar. 
With the overthrow of Leslie fell the power of Argyle and the narrow 
Presbyterians whom he led. Hamilton, the brother and successor of 
the Duke who had been captured at Preston, brought back the Royahsts 
to the camp, and Charles insisted on taking part in the Council and 
on being crowned at Scone. Master of Edinburgh, but foiled in an 
attack on Stirling, Cromwell waited through the winter and the long 
spring, while intestine feuds broke up the nation opposed to him, and 
while the stricter Covenanters retired sulkily from the Royal army on ' 
the return of the " Malignants," the " Royahsts " of the earlier war, to ; 
its ranks. With summer the campaign recommenced, but Leslie 
again fell back on his system of positions, and Cromwell, finding his : 
camp at Stirling unassailable, crossed into Fife and left the road open , 
to the south. The bait was taken. In spite of Leslie's counsels ' 
Charles resolved to invade England, and was soon in full march through 
Lancashire upon the Severn, with the English horse under Lambert 
hanging on his rear, and the English foot hastening to close the road 
to London by York and Coventry. " W^e have done to the best of our 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



561 



judgment," Cromwell replied to the angry alarm of the Parliament, 
" knowing that if some issue were not put to this business it would 
occasion another winter's war." At Coventry he learnt Charles's posi- 
tion, and swept round by Evesham upon Worcester, where the Scotch 
King was encamped. Throwing half his force across the river, Crom- 
well attacked the town on both sides on the anniversary of his victory 
at Dunbar. He led the van in person, and was " the first to set foot 
on the enemy's ground." When Charles descended from the Cathedral 
Tower to fling himself on the eastern division, Cromwell hurried over the 
river, and was soon " riding in the midst of the fire." For four or five 
hours, he told the Parliament, " it was as stiff a contest as ever I have 
seen;" the Scots outnumbered and beaten into the city gave no answer 
but shot to offers of quarter, and it was not till nightfall that all was 
over. The loss of the victors was as usual inconsiderable. The con- 
quered lost six thousand men, and all their baggage and artillery. 
Leshe was among the prisoners : Hamilton among the dead 

" Now that the King is dead and his son defeated," Cromwell said 
gravely to the Parliament, ^' I think it necessary to come to a settle- 
ment." But the settlement which had been promised after Naseby was 
still as distant as ever after Worcester. The bill for dissolving the 
present Parhament, though Cromwell pressed it in person, was only 
passed, after bitter opposition, by a majority of two ; and even this suc- 
cess had been purchased by a compromise which permitted the House 
to sit for three years more. Internal affairs were simply at a dead lock. 
The Parliament appoint;ed committees to prepare plans for legal reform.s, 
or for ecclesiastical reforms, but it did nothing to carry them into 
effect. It was overpowered by the crowd of affairs which the con- 
fusion of the war had thrown into its hands, by confiscations, seques- 
trations, appointments to civil and military offices, the whole adminis- 
tration in fact of the state ; and there were times when it was driven 
to a resolve not to take any private affairs for weeks together in order 
that it might make some progress with public business. To add to 
this confusion and muddle there were the inevitable scandals which 
arose from it ; charges of malversation and corruption were hurled at the 
members of the House ; and some, like Haslerig, were accused with jus- 
tice of using their power to further their own interests. The one remedy 
for all this was, as the arm.y saw, the assembly of a new and complete 
Parliament in place of the mere " rump " of the old ; but this was the 
one measure which the House was resolute to avert. Vane spurred it to 
a new activity. The Amnesty Bill was forced through after fifteen 
divisions. A Grand Committee, with Sir Matthew Hale at its head, 
vv^as appointed to consider the reform of the law. The union with 
Scotland was pushed resolutely forward ; eight English Cornxmissioners 
convoked a Convention of delegates from its counties and boroughs at 
Edinburgh, and in spite of dogged opposition procured a vote in favour 

o o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



of union. A bill was introduced ratifying the measure, and admitting 
representatives from Scotland into the next Parliament. A similar 
plan was soon proposed for a union with Ireland. But it was necessary 
for Vane's purposes not only to show the energy of the Parliament, but to 
free it from the control of the army. His aim was to raise in the 
navy, a force devoted to the House and to eclipse the glories of 
Dunbar and Worcester by yet greater triumphs at sea. With this 
view the quarrel with Holland had been carefully nursed ; a " Naviga- 
tion Act " prohibiting the importation in foreign vessels of any but the 
products of the countries to which they belonged struck a fatal blow at 
the carrying trade from which the Dutch drew their wealth ; and fresh 
debates arose from the English claim to salutes from all vessels in the 
Channel. The two fleets met before Dover, and a summons from 
Blake to lower the Dutch flag was met by the Dutch admiral. Van 
Tromp, with a broadside. The States-General attributed the collision 
to accident, and offered to recall Van Tromp ; but the English demands 
rose at each step in the negotiations till war became inevitable. The 
army hardly needed the warning conveyed by the introduction of a 
bill for its disbanding to understand the new policy of the Parliament. 
It was significant that while accepting the bill for its own dissolution 
the House had as yet prepared no plan for the assembly which was to 
follow it ; and the Dutch war had hardly been declared when, aban- 
doning the attitude of inaction which it had observed since the begin- 
ning of the Commonwealth, the army petitioned, not only for reform in 
Church and State, but for an explicit declaration that the House would 
bring its proceedings to a close. The Petition forced the House to 
discuss a bill for " a New Representative," but the discussion soon 
brought out the resolve of the sitting members to continue as a part of 
the coming Parliament without re-election. The officers, irritated 
by such a claim, demanded in conference after conference an immediate 
dissolution, and the House as resolutely refused. In ominous words 
Cromwell supported the demand of the army. " As for the members 
of this Parliament, the army begins to take them in disgust. I would 
it did so with less reason.^^ There was just ground, he urged, for 
discontent in their selfish greed of houses and lands, the scandalous 
lives of many, their partiality as judges, their interference with the 
ordinary course of law in matters of private interest, their delay of 
law reform, above all in their manifest design of perpetuating their 
own power. " There is little to hope for from such men," he ended 
with a return to his predominant thought, "for a settlement of the 
nation." 

The crisis was averted for a moment by the events of the war. A 
terrible storm had separated the two fleets when on the point of en- 
gaging in the Orkneys, but Ruyter and Blake met again in the Channel, 
and after a fxerce struggle the Dutch was forced to retire under cover 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



5^3 



of night. Since the downfall of Spain Holland had been the first naval 
power in the world, and the spirit of the nation rose gallantly wdth its 
earhest defeat. Immense efforts were made to strengthen the fleet, and ! 
the veteran, Van Tromp, who was replaced at its head, appeared in the 1 
Channel with seventy-three ships of war. Blake had but half the num- 1 
ber, but he at once accepted the challenge, and the unequal fight went i a^^-~ 55, 
on doggedly till nightfall, when the English fleet withdrew shattered \ 
into the Thames. Tromp swept the Channel in triumph, with a broom 
at his masthead ; and the tone of the House lowered with the defeat 
of their favourite force. A compromise seems to have been arranged 
between the two parties, for the bill providing a new Representative 
was again pushed on ; and the Parliament agreed to retire in the 
coming November, while Cromwell offered no opposition to a reduction 
of the Army. But the courage of the House rose again with a turn 
of fortune. The strenuous efforts of Blake enabled him again to put 
to sea in a few months after his defeat, and a running fight through 
four days ended at last in an English victory, though Tromp's fine 
seamanship enabled him to save the convoy he was guarding. The ^^^' ^^^^* 
House at once insisted on the retention of its power. Not only w-ere 
the existing members to continue as menvbers of the New Parliament, 
depriving the places they represented of their right of choosing repre- 
sentatives, but they were to constitute a Committee of Revision, to 
determine the validity of each election, and the fitness of the mem- 
bers returned. A conference took place between the leaders of the 
Commons and the Officers of the Army, who resolutely demanded not 
only the omission of these clauses, buC that the Parliament should at 
once dissolve itself, and commit the new elections to the Council of 
State. " Our charge," retorted Haslerig, '^ cannot be transferred to 
any one." The conference was adjourned till the next morning, on an 
understanding that no decisive step should be taken ; but it had no 
sooner re-assembled, than the absence of the leading members confirmed 
the news that Vane was fast pressing the bill for a new Representative 
through the House. " It is contrary to common honesty,^^ Cromwell 
angrily broke out ; and, quitting Whitehall, he summoned a company 
of musketeers to follow him as far as the door of the Commons. He 
sate dowm quietly in his place, " clad in plain grey clothes and grey 
worsted stockings," and listened to Vane^s passionate arguments. " I 
am come to do what grieves me to the heart," he said to his neighbour, 
St John, but he still remained quiet, till Vane pressed the House to 
waive its usual forms and pass the bill at once. " The time has come," 
he said to Harrison. " Tliink well," replied Harrison, " it is a danger- 
ous work !" and Cromwell listened for another quarter of an hour. At 
the question " that this Bill do pass," he at length rose, and his tone 
grew higher as he repeated his former charges of injustice, self interest, 
and delay. " Your hour is come," he ended, '' the Lord hath done with 

2 



5^4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



you ! " A crowd of members started to their feet in angry protest. 
" Come, come " replied Cromwell, '* we have had enough of this ; " and 
striding into the midst of the chamber, he clapt his hat on his head, and 
exclaimed, *' I will put an end to your prating ! '' In the din that fol- 
lowed his voice was heard in broken sentences—" It is not fit that you 
should sit here any longer ! You should give place to better men ! You 
are no Parliament/' Thirty musketeers entered at a sign from their 
General, and the fifty members present crowded to the door. " Drunk- 
ard ! " Cromwell broke out as Wentworth passed him ; and Martin was 
taunted with a yet coarser name. Vane, fearless to the last, told him 
his act was " against all right and all honour." " Ah, Sir Harry Vane, 
Sir Harry Vane," Cromwell retorted in bitter indignation at the trick 
he had been played. " You might have prevented all this, but you are 
a juggler, and have no common honesty ! The Lord deliver me from 
Sir Harry Vane ! " The Speaker refused to quit his seat, till Harrison 
offered to " lend him a hand to come down." Cromwell Hfted the mace 
from the table. " What shall we do with this bauble ?" he said. " Take 
it away ! " The door of the house was locked at last, and the dis- 
persion of the Parhament was followed a few hours after by that of 
its executive committee, the Council of State. Cromwell himself 
summoned them to withdraw. " We have heard," repHed a member. 
John Bradshaw, "what you have done this morning at the House, and 
in some hours all England will hear it. But you mistake, sir, if you 
think the Parliament dissolved. No power on earth can dissolve the 
Parliament but itself, be sure of that ! " 

Section X.—The Fall of Puritanism. 1653— 1660. 

\_AtUhorities, — Many of the works mentioned before are still valuable, but 
the real key to the history of this period lies in Cromwell's remarkable series of 
Speeches (Carlyle, ** Letters and Speeches," vol. iii.)- Tlmrloe's State Papers 
furnish an immense mass of documents. For the Second Parliament of the 
Protector we have Burton's **Diary." M. Guizot's " Cromwell and the Republic " 
is the best modern account of the time, and especially valuable for the foreign 
transactions of the Protectorate. For the Restoration, see his ** Richard Crom- 
well and the Restoration," Ludlow's ** Memoirs," Baxter's ** Autobiography," 
and the Clarendon State Papers, with the minute and accurate account 
given by Clarendon himself.] 



The dispersion both of the Parliament and of its executive com 
mission left England without a government, for the authority of ever 
official ended with that of the body from which his power was derivec 
Cromwell, in fact, as Captain- General of the forces, found himself lei 
solely responsible for the maintenance of public order. But no though 
of military despotism can be fairly traced in the acts of the genen 
or the army. They were in fact far from regarding their position as z 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



S'^S 



revolutionary one. Though incapable of justification on any formal 
ground, their proceedings had as yet been substantially in vindication 
of the older constitution, and the opinion of the nation had gone fully 
with the army in its demand for a full and efficient body of representa- 
tives, as well as in its resistance to the project by which the Rump 
would have deprived half England of its rights of election. It was 
only when no other means existed of preventing such a wrong that the 
soldiers had driven out the wrongdoers. " It is you that have forced 
me to this,^' Cromwell exclaimed, as he drove the members from the 
House ; " I have sought the Lord night and day that He would rather 
slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." The act was one 
of violence to the members of the House, but the act which it aimed 
at preventing was one of violence on their part to the constitutional 
rights of the whole nation. The people had in fact been " dissatisfied 
in every corner of the realm " at the state of public affairs : and the 
expulsion of the members was ratified by a general assent. ''We 
did not hear a dug bark at their going," the Protector said years after- 
wards. Whatever anxiety may have been felt at the use which was like 
to be made of " the power of the sword," was at once dispelled by a 
proclamation of the officers. Their one anxiety was " not to grasp 
the power ourselves nor to keep it in military hands, no not for a day," 
and their promise to " call to the government men of approved fidelity 
and honesty" was redeemed by the nomination of a new Council of 
State, consisting of eight officers of high rank and four civilians, with 
Cromwell as their head, and a seat in which was offered, though fruit- 
lessly, to Vane. The first business of such a body was clearly to 
summon a new Parliament and to resign its trust into its hands : but the 
bill for Parliamentary reform had dropped with the expulsion : and 
reluctant as the Council was to summon the new Parliament on the old 
basis of election, it shrank from the responsibility of effecting so 
fundamental a change as the creation of a new basis by its own authority. 
It w^as this difficulty which led to the expedient of a Constituent 
Convention. Cromwell told the story of this unlucky assembly some 
years after with an amusing frankness. " I will come and tell you a 
story of my own weakness and folly. And yet it was done in my 
simplicity — I dare avow it was. ... It was thought then that men of 
our own judgment, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece 
on that account — why, surely, these men will hit it, and these men 
will do it to the purpose, whatever can be desired ! And surely we 
^did think, and I did think so — the more blame to me ! " Of the 



Sec. X. 



^^(hundred and fifty-six men, '^ faithful, fearing God, and hating covetous- 
"Iness,'' whose names were selected for this purpose by the Council of 
J- State, from lists furnished by the congregational churches, the bulk 
"were men, like Ashley Cooper, of good blood and "free estates ; " and 
the proportion of burgesses, such as the leather-merchant, Praise-God 



£66 



HISTORY OF THE EJSI GUSH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Barebones, whose name was eagerly seized on as a nickname for the 
body to which he belonged, seems to have been much the same as in 
eadier Parliaments. But the circumstances of their choice told fatally 
on the temper of its members. Cromwell himself, in the burst of 
rugged eloquence with which he welcomed their assembling, was 
carried away by a strange enthusiasm. " Convince the nation," he 
said, " that as men fearing God have fought them out of their bondage 
under the regal power, so men fearing God do now rule them in the 
fear of God. . . . Own your call, for it is of God : indeed, it is 
marvellous, and it hath been unprojected. . . . Never was a supreme 
power under such a way of owning God and being owned by Him," 
A spirit yet more enthusiastic at once appeared in the proceedings of 
the Convention. The resignation of their powers by Cromwell and the 
Council into its hands left it the one supreme authority ; but by the 
instrument which convoked it provision 'had been made that this 
authority should be transferred in fifteen months to another assembly 
elected according to its directions. Its work was, in fact, to be that 
of a constituent assembly, paving the way for a Parliament on a really 
national basis ; but the Convention put the largest construction on its 
commission, and boldly undertook the whole task of constitutional 
reform. Committees were appointed to consider the needs of the 
Church and the nation. The spirit of economy and honesty which 
pervaded the assembly appeared in its redress of the extravagance 
which prevailed in the civil service, and of the inequality of taxation. 
With a remarkable energy it undertook a host of reforms, for whose 
execution England has had to wait to our own day. The Long 
Parliament had shrunk from any reform of the Court of Chancery, 
where twenty-three thousand cases were waiting unheard. The 
Convention proposed its abolition. The work of compiling a single 
code of laws, begun under the Long Parliament by a committee with 
Sir Matthew Hale at its head, was again pushed forward. The 
frenzied alarm which these bold measures aroused among the lawyer 
class was soon backed by that of the clergy, who saw their wealth 
menaced by the establishment of civil marriage and by proposals to 
substitute the free contributions of congregations for the payment of 
tithes. The landed proprietors too rose against the scheme for the 
abolition of lay-patronage, which was favoured by the Convention, and 
predicted an age of confiscation. The " Barebones Parliament," as 
the assembly was styled in derision, was charged with a design to ruin 
property, the Church, and the law, with enmity to knowledge, and a 
bUnd and ignorant fanaticism. Cromwell himself shared the general 
uneasiness at its proceedings. His mind was that of an adminis- 
trator, rather than that of a statesman, unspeculative, deficient in 
foresight, conservative, and eminently practical. He saw the need of 
administrative reform in Church and State ; but he had no sympathy 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



567 



whatever with the revolutionary theories which were filHng the air 
around him. His desire was for "a settlement" which should be 
accompanied with as little disturbance of the old state of things as 
possible. If Monarchy had vanished in the turmoil of war, his 
experience of the Long Parliament only confirmed him in his belief of 
the need of establishing an executive power of a similar kind, apart 
from the power of the legislature, as a condition of civil liberty. His 
sword had won " Hberty of conscience ; " but passionately as he clung 
to it, he was still for an established Church, for a parochial system, and 
a ministry maintained by tithes. His social tendencies were simply 
those of the class to which he belonged. " I was by birth a 
gentleman," he told a later Parliament, and in the old social arrange- 
ment of " a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman," he saw " a good 
interest of the nation and a great one." He hated " that levelling 
principle" which tended to the reducing of all to one equality. 
" What was the purport r\{ it," he asks with an amusing simplicity, " but 
to make the tenant as liberal in future as the landlord 1 " 

To a practical temper such as this the speculative reforms of the 
Convention were as distasteful as to the law}'ers and clergy whom 
they attacked. "Nothing," said Cromwell, "was in the hearts 
of these men but ' overturn, overturn.' " But he was delivered from 
his embarrassment by the internal dissensions of the Assembly itself. 
The day after the decision against tithes the more conservative mem- 
bers snatched a vote by surprise " that the sitting of this Parliament 
any longer, as now constituted, will not be for the good of the 
Commonwealth, and that it is requisite to deliver up unto the Lord- 
General the powers we received from him." The Speaker placed 
their abdication in CromwelFs hands, and the act was confirmed by 
the subsequent adhesion of a majority of the members. The dissolu- 
tion of the Convention replaced matters in the state in which its 
assembly had found them ; but there was still the same general 
anxiety to substitute some sort of legal rule for the power of the sword. 
The Convention had named during its session a fresh Council of State, 
and this body at once drew up, under the name of the Instrument of 
Government, a remarkable Constitution, which was adopted by the 
Council of Officers. They were driven by necessity to the step 
from which they had shrunk before, that of convening a Parlia- 
ment on the reformed basis of representation. The House was 
to consist of four hundred members from England, thirty from Scot- 
land, and thirty from Ireland. The seats hitherto assigned to small 
and rotten boroughs were transferred to larger constituencies, and for 
the most part to counties. All special rights of voting in the election 
of members was abolished, and replaced by a general right of suffrage, 
based on the possession of real or personal property to the value of two 
hundred pounds. CathoHcs and " Malignants," as those who had 



56S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



I 



fought for the King were called, were alone excluded from the franchise. 
Constitutionally, all further organization of the form of government 
should have been left to this Assembly ; but the dread of disorder 
during the interval of its election, as well as a longing for "settle-^ 
ment," drove the Council to complete their work by pressing the 
office of " Protector " upon Cromwell. " They told me that excep 
I would undertake the government they thought things would hardl 
come to a composure or settlement, but blood and confusion would 
break in as before." If we follow, however, his own statement, it 
was when they urged that the acceptance of such a Protectorate 
actually Hmited his power as Lord-General, and "bound his hands 
to act nothing without the consent of a Council until the Parha- 
ment," that the post was accepted. The powers of th^ new Protector 
indeed were strictly Hmited. Though the membett of the Council 
were originally named by him, each men- '^~ was irremovable save by 
consent of the rest : their advice was TiK.C ",ry in all foreign affairs, 
their consent in matters of peace and war, their approval in nomina- 
tions to the great offices of state, or the disposal of the militai 
or civil power. With this body too lay the choice of all futun 
Protectors. To the administrative check of the Cou.icil was added th 
political check of the Parliament. Three years at the most were t 
elapse between the assembling of one Parliament and another. Lawj 
could not be made, nor taxes imposed but by its authority, and after* 
the lapse of twenty days the statutes it passed became laws even if 
the Protector's assent was refused to them. The new Constitution was 
undoubtedly popular ; and the promise of a real Parliament in a few 
months covered the want of any legal character in the new rule. The 
Government v/as generally accepted as a provisional one, which could 
only acquire legal authority from the ratification of its acts in th 
coming session ; and the desire to settle it on such a Parliamentar 
basis was universal among the members of the new Assembly which 
met in the autumn at Westminster. 

Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more truly 
representative of the English people, than the Parliament of 1654. 
It was the first Parliament in our history where members from Scot- 
land and Ireland sate side by side with those from England, as they 
sit in the Parliament of to-day. The members for rotten boroughs 
and pocket-boroughs had disappeared. In spite of the exclusion of 
the Royalists from the polling-booths, and the arbitrary erasure of the 
names of a few ultra-republican members by the Council, the House 
had a better title to the name of a "free Parliament" th-^n any 
which had sat before. The freedom with which the electors had 
exercised their right of voting was seen indeed in the large 
number of Presbyterian members who were returned, and in the 
reappearance of Haslerig and Bradshaw, with many membeis of 



?| 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



569 



the Long Parliament, side by side with Lord Herbert and the older 
Sir Harry Vane. The first business of the House was clearly to 
consider the question of government ; and Haslerig, with the fiercer 
republicans, at once denied the legal existence of either Council or 
Protector, on the ground that the Long Parliament had never been 
dissolved. Such an argument, however, told as much against the 
Parliament in which they sate as against the administration itself, and 
the bulk of the Assembly contented themselves with declining to 
recognize the Constitution or Protectorate as of more than provisional 
vahdity. They proceeded at once to settle the government on a 
Parliamentary basis. The " Instrument " was taken as the groundwork 
of the new Constitution, and carried clause by clause. That Cromwell 
should retain his rule as Protector was unanimously agreed ; that he 
should possess 3 right of veto or a co-ordinate legislative power with 
the Parliament was hotly ,'^'ebated, though the violent language of 
Haslerig did little to d'v^- -the general tone of moderation. Sud- 
denly, however, Cromwen interposed. If he had undertaken the 
duties of Protector with reluctance, he looked on all legal defects in 
his title as more than supplied by the general acceptance of the 
nation. *' I callet not myself to this place," he urged, " God and the 
people of these kingdoms have borne testimony to it." His rule had 
been accepted by London, by the army, by the solemn decision of the 
judges, by addresses from every shire, by the very appearance of the 
members of the Parliament in answer to his writ. " Why may I not 
balance this Providence," he asked, " with any hereditary interest ? " 
In this national approval he saw a call from God, a Divine Right of 
a higher order than that of the kings who had gone before. But 
there was another ground for the anxiety with which he watched the 
proceedings of the Commons. His passion for administration had 
far overstepped the bounds of a merely provisional rule in the 
interval before the assembling of the Parliament. His desire for 
" settlement " had been strengthened not only by the drift of public 
opinion, but by the urgent need of every day ; and the power reserved 
by the "Instrument" to issue temporary Ordinances, "until further 
order in such matters, to be taken by the Parliament," gave a scope 
to his marvellous activity of which he at once took advantage. Sixty- 
four Ordinances had been issued in the nine months before the 
meeting of the Parhament. Peace had been concluded with Holland. 
The Church had been set in order. The law itself had been 
minutely regulated. The union with Scotland had been brought 
to completion. So far was Cromwell from dreaming that these 
measures, or the authority which enacted them, would be questioned, 
that he looked to Parliament simply to complete his work. "The 
great end of your meeting," he said at the first assembly of its mem- 
bers, " is healing and settHng." Though he had himself done much, 



570 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Tlie Ne"w 
Vyranny . 



he added, " there was still much to be done." Peace had to be made 
with Portugal, and alliance with Spain. Bills were laid before the 
House for the codification of the law. The plantation and settlement 
of Ireland had still to be completed. He resented the setting these 
projects aside for constitutional questions which, as he held, a Divine 
call had decided, but he resented yet more the renewed claim advanced 
by Parliament to the sole power of legislation. As we have seen, his 
experience of the evils which had arisen from the concentration of 
legislative and executive power in the Long Parliament had convinced 
Cromwell of the danger to public liberty which lay in such a union. 
He saw in the joint government of " a single person and a Parlia- 
ment '' the only assurance " that Parliaments should not make them- 
selves perpetual," or that their power should not be perverted to 
public wrong. But whatever strength there may have been in the 
Protector's arguments, the act by which he proceeded to enforce 
them was fatal to liberty, and in the end to Puritanism. " If my 
calling be from God," he ended, " and my testimony from the 
People., God and the People shall take it from me, else I will not 
part from it.'' And he announced that no member would be suffered 
to enter the House without signing an engagement " not to alter the 
Government as it is settled in a single person and a Parliament." 
No act of the Stuarts had been a bolder defiance of constitutional 
law ; and the act was as needless as it was illegal. One hundred 
members alone refused to take the engagement, and the signatures 
of three-fourths of the House proved that the security Cromwell 
desired might have been easily procured by a vote of Parliament. 
But those who remained resumed their constitutional task with 
unbroken firmness. They quietly asserted their sole title to govern- 
ment by referring the Protector's Ordinances to Committees for 
revision, and for conversion into laws. The "Instrument of Govern- 
ment" was turned into a bill, debated, and read a third time. Money 
votes, as in previous Parliaments, were deferred till " grievances " had 
been settled. But Cromwell once more intervened. The Royalists 
were astir again ; and he attributed their renewed hopes to the hostile 
attitude which he attributed to the Parliament. The army, which 
remained unpaid while the supplies were delayed, was seething with 
discontent. " It looks," said the Protector, " as if the laying grounds 
for a quarrel had rather been designed than to give the people settle- 
ment. Judge yourselves whether the contesting of things that were 
provided for by this government hath been profitable expense of time 
for the good of this nation." In words of angry reproach he declared 
the Parliament dissolved. 

With the dissolution of the Parliament of 1654 ended all show of 
legal rule. The Protectorate, deprived by its own act of all chance 
of legal sanction, became a simple t}Tanny. Cromwell professed, 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



571 



indeed, to be restrained by the "Instrument:'' but the one great 
restraint on his power which the Instrument provided, the inability to 
levy taxes save by consent of Parliament, was set aside on the plea of 
necessity. " The People," said the Protector in words which Strafford 
might have uttered, " will prefer their real security to forms.'' That a 
danger of Royalist revolt existed was undeniable, but the danger was at 
once doubled by the general discontent. From this moment, Whitelock 
tells us, "many sober and noble patriots," in despair of public liberty, 
" did begin to incline to the King's restoration." In the mass of the 
population the reaction was far more rapid. " Charles Stuart," writes a 
Cheshire correspondent to the Secretary of State, " hath five hundred 
friends in these adjacent counties for every one friend to you among 
them." But before the overpowering strength of the army even this 
general discontent was powerless. Yorkshire, where the Royalist 
insurrection was expected to be most formidable, never ventured to 
rise at all. There were risings in Devon, Dorset, and the Welsh 
Marches, but they were quickly put down, and their leaders brought to 
the scaffold. Easily however as the revolt was suppressed, the terror of 
the Government was seen in the energetic measures to which Cromwell 
resorted in the hope of securing order. The country was divided into 
ten military governments, each with a major-general at its head, who 
was empowered to disarm all Papists and Royalists, and to arrest 
suspected persons. Funds for the support of this military despotism 
were provided by an Ordinance of the Council of State, which enacted 
that all who had at any time borne arms for the King should pay 
every year a tenth part of their income, in spite of the Act of Oblivion, 
as a fine for their Royalist tendencies. The despotism of the major- 
generals was seconded by the older expedients of tyranny. The 
Episcopalian clergy had been zealous in promoting the insurrection, 
and they were forbidden in revenge to act as ministers or as tutors. 
The press was placed under a strict censorship. The payment of 
taxes levied by the sole authority of the Protector was enforced by 
distraint ; and when a collector was sued in the courts for redress, 
the counsel for the prosecution were sent to the Tower. 

If pardon, indeed, could ever be won for a tyranny, the wisdom 
and grandeur with which he used the power he had usurped would 
win pardon for the Protector. The greatest among the many great 
enterprises undertaken by the Long Parhament had been the Union 
of the three Kingdoms : and that of Scotland with England had 
been brought about, at the very end of its career, by the tact and 
vigour of Sir Harry Vane. But its practical realization was left to 
Cromwell. In four months of hard fighting General Monk brought 
the Highlands to a new tranquillity ; and the presence of an army 
of seven thousand men, backed by a line of forts, kept the most 
restless of the clans in good order. The settlement of the country 



s^^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



was brought about by the temperance and sagacity of Menkes suc- 
cessor, General Deane. No further interference with the Presby- 
terian system was attempted beyond the suppression of the General 
Assembly. But religious liberty w^as resolutely protected, and Deane 
ventured even to interfere on behalf of the miserable victims whom 
Scotch bigotry was torturing and burning on the charge of witch- 
craft. Even steady Royalists acknowledged the justice of the Govern- 
ment and the wonderful discipline of its troops. " We always reckon 
those eight years of the usurpation," said Burnet afterwards, " a time 
of great peace and prosperity." Sterner work had to be done before 
Ireland could be brought into real union with its sister kingdoms. 
The work of conquest had been continued by Ireton, and com- 
pleted after his death by General Ludlow, as mercilessly as it had 
begun. Thousands perished by famine or the sword. Shipload after 
shipload of those who surrendered were sent over sea for sale into 
forced labour in Jamaica and the West Indies. More than forty 
thousand of the beaten Catholics were permitted to enhst for foreign 
service, and found a refuge in exile under the banners of France afid 
Spain. The work of settlement, which was undertaken by Henry 
Cromwell, the younger and abler of the Protector's sons, turned out 
to be even more terrible than the work of the sword. It took as its 
model the Colonization of Ulster, the fatal measure which had 
destroyed all hope of a united Ireland and had brought inevitably 
in its train the massacre and the war. The people were divided into 
classes in the order of their assumed guilt. All who after fair trial 
were proved to have personally taken part in the massacre were 
sentenced to banishment or death. The general amnesty which freed 
"those of the meaner sort" from all question on other scores was 
far from extending to the landowners. Catholics proprietors who had 
shown no goodwill to the Parliament, even though they had taken no 
part in the war, were punished by the forfeiture of a third of their 
estates. All who had borne arms were held to have forfeited the whole, 
and driven into Connaught, where fresh estates were carved out for 
them from the lands of the native clans. No such doom had ever 
fallen on a nation in modern times as fell upon Ireland in its new 
settlement. Among the bitter memories which part Ireland from 
England the memory of the bloodshed and confiscation which thta 
Puritans wrought remains the bitterest ; and the worst curse an 
Irish peasant can hurl at his enemy is " the curse of Cromwell." But 
pitiless as the Protector's pohcy was, it was successful in the ends at 
which it aimed. The whole native population lay helpless and crushed. 
Peace and order were restored, and a large incoming of Protestant 
settlers from England and Scotland brought a new prosperity to the 
wasted country. Above all, the legislative union which had been 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



brought about with Scotland was now carried out with Ireland^ and 
thirty seats were allotted to its representatives in the general Parliament. 
In England Cromwell dealt with the Royalists as irreconcilable 
enemies ; but in every other respect he carried fairly out his pledge of 
<* healing and settling." The series of administrative reforms planned 
by the Convention had been partially carried into effect before the meet- 
ing of Parliament in 1654 ; but the work was pushed on after the dissolu- 
tion of the House with yet greater energy. Nearly a hundred Ordinances 
showed the industry of the Government. Police, public amusements, 
roads, finances, the condition of prisons, the imprisonment of debtors, 
were a few among the subjects which claimed CromwelFs attention. 
An Ordinance of more than fifty clauses reformed the Court of 
Chancery. The anarchy which had reigned in the Church since 
the break down of Episcopacy and the failure of the Presbyterian 
system to supply its place, v/a3 put an end to by a series of v/ise 
and temperate measures for its reorganization. Rights of- patronage 
were left untouched ; but a Board of Triers, a fourth of whom were 
laymen, was appointed to examine the fitness of ministers presented 
to livings ; and a Church board of gentry and clergy w^as set up 
in every county to exercise a supervision over ecclesiastical affairs, 
and to detect and remove scandalous and ineffectual ministers. 
Even by the confession of Cromwell's opponents, the plan worked 
well. It furnished the country with " able, serious preachers,'* Baxter 
tells us, "who lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever 
they were," and, as both Presbyterian and Independent ministers were 
presented to livings at the will of their patrons, it solved so far as 
practical working was concerned the problem of a religious union among 
Protestants on the base of a wide variety of Christian opinion. From 
the Church which was thus reorganized all power of interference with 
faiths differing from its owm was resolutely withheld. Cromwell re- 
mained true throughout to his great cause of religious liberty. Even 
the Quaker, rejected by all other Christian bodies as an anarchist 
and blasphemer, found sympathy and protection in Cromwell. The 
[ews had been excluded from England since the reign of Edward 
the First ; and a prayer which they now presented for leave to 
return was refused by the commission of merchants and divines to 
whom the Protector referred it for consideration. But the refusal was 
quietly passed over, and the connivance of Cromwell in the settle- 
ment of a few Hebrews in London and Oxford was so clearly under- 
stood that no one ventured to interfere with them. 

No part of his policy is more characteristic of Cromwell's mind, 
whether in its strength or in its weakness, than his management of 
foreign affairs. While England had been absorbed in her long and ob- 
stinate struggle for freedom the whole face of the world around her had 
changed. The Thirty Years' War was over. The victories of Gustavus, 



574 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



and of the Swedish generals who followed him, had been seconded by 
the policy of Richeheu and the intervention of France. Protestantism 
in Germany was no longer in peril from the bigotry or ambition of the 
House of Austria; and the Treaty of Westphalia had drawn a 
permanent line between the territories belonging to the adherents of 
the old religion and the new. There was little danger, indeed, now to 
Europe from the great Catholic House which had threatened its 
freedom ever since Charles the Fifth. Its Austrian branch was called 
away from dreams of aggression in the west to a desperate struggle 
with the Turk for the possession of Hungary and the security of Austria 
itself. Spain, from causes which it is no part of our present story to 
detail, was falling into a state of strange decrepitude. So far from 
aiming to be mistress of Europe, she was rapidly sinking into the almost 
helpless prey of France. It was France which had become the 
dominant power in Christendom, though her position was far from 
being as commanding as it was to become under Lewis the Fourteenth. 
The peace and order which prevailed after the cessation of the 
religious troubles throughout her compact and fertile territory gave 
scope at last to the quick and industrious temper of the French people ; 
while her wealth and energy was placed by the centralizing adminis- 
tration of Henry the Fourth, of Richelieu, and of Mazarin, almost 
absolutely in the hands of the Crown. Under the three great rulers 
who have just been named her ambition was steadily directed to the 
same purpose of territorial aggrandizement, and though limited as yet 
to the annexation of the Spanish and Imperial territories, which still 
parted her frontier from the Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Rhine, a 
statesman of wise political genius would have discerned the beginning 
of that great struggle for supremacy over Europe at large which was 
only foiled by the genius of Marlborough and the victories of the 
Grand Alliance. But in his view of European politics Cromwell 
was misled by the conservative and unspeculative temper of his mind 
as well as by the strength of his religious enthusiasm. Of the change 
in the world around him he seems to have discerned nothing. He 
brought to the Europe of Mazarin simply the hopes and ideas with which 
all England was thrilhng in his youth at the outbreak of the Thirty 
Years' War. Spain was still to him "the head of the Papal Interest,'* 
whether at home or abroad. "The Papists in England," he said to 
the Parliament of 1656, "have been accounted, ever since I was born, 
Spaniolized; they never regarded France, or any other Papist state, 
but Spain only." The old Enghsh hatred of Spain, the old Enghsh 
resentment at the shameful part which the nation had been forced to 
play in the great German struggle by the policy of James and of Charles, 
lived on in Cromwell, and was only strengthened by the religious 
enthusiasm which the success of Puritanism had kindled within him. 
" The Lord Himself," he wrote to his admirals as they sailed to the 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



West Indies, "hath a controversy with your enemies ; even with that 
Romish Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper. 
In that respect we fight the Lord's battles." What Sweden had been 
under Gustavus, England, Cromwell dreamt, might be now— the head 
of a great Protestant League in the struggle against Catholic aggres- 
sion. " You have on your shoulders," he said to the Parliament of 
1654, "the interest of all the Christian people of the world. I wish it 
may be written on our hearts to be zealous for that interest." The 
first step in such a struggle would necessarily be to league the 
Protestant powers together, and Cromwell's earliest efforts were 
directed to bring the ruinous and indecisive quarrel with Holland 
to an end. The fierceness of the strife had grown with each engage- 
ment ; but the hopes of Holland fell with her admiral, Tromp, 
who received a mortal wound at the moment when he had succeeded 
in forcing the Enghsh line ; and the skill and energy of his suc- 
cessor, De Ruyter, struggled in vain to restore her waning fortunes. 
She was saved by the expulsion of the Long Parliament, which 
had persisted in its demand of a political union of the two countries ; 
and the new policy of Cromwell was seen in the conclusion of 
peace on a simple pledge from the Dutch to compensate English 
merchants for their losses in the war. The peace with Holland 
was followed by the conclusion of like treaties with Sweden and 
with Denmark ; and on the arrival of a Swedish envoy with offers 
of a league of friendship, Cromwell endeavoured to bring the Dutch, j 
the Brandeburgers, and the Danes into the same confederation of the | 
Protestant powers. His efforts in this direction, though they never 
wholly ceased, were foiled for the moment ; but Cromv/ell was resolute 
to kindle again the religious strife which had been closed by the treaty 
of Westphalia, and he seized on a quarrel between, the Duke of Savoy 
and his Protestant subjects in the valleys of Piedmont as a means of 
kindling it. A ruthless massacre of these Vaudois by the Duke's troops 
had roused deep resentment throughout England, a resentment 
which still breathes in the noblest of Milton's sonnets. While the 
poet called on God to avenge his " slaughtered saints whose bones lie 
scattered on the Alpine mountains cold," Cromwell was already busy 
with the work of earthly vengeance. An English envoy appeared at the 
Duke's court with haughty demands of redress. Their refusal would 
have been followed by instant war, for the Protestant Cantons of 
Switzerland were bribed into promising a force of ten thousand men 
for an attack on Savoy ; and how far Cromwell expected the flame to 
spread was seen in his attitude towards Spain. He had already 
demanded freedom of trade and worship for English merchants in 
Spanish America ; and a fleet \vith three thousand men on board was 
now secretly dispatched against San Domingo. 

As though to announce the outbreak of a world-wide struggle, Blake 



Sec X. 



57^ 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



appeared in the Mediterranean, bombarded Algiers, and destroyed the 
fleet with which its pirates had ventured through the reign of Charles 
to insult the Enghsh coast. The thunder of his guns, every Puritan 
believed, would be heard in the castle of St. Angelo, and Rome itself 
would have to bow to the greatness of Cromwell. But the vast schemes 
of the Protector everywhere broke down. The cool Italian who ruled 
France, Cardinal Mazarin, foiled his projects in Piedmont by forcing 
the Duke of Savoy to grant the English demands. Blake, who had 
sailed to the Spanish coast, failed to intercept the treasure ileet from 
America, and the West Indian expedition was foiled in its descent on 
San Domingo. Its conquest of Jamaica, important as it really was 
in breaking through the monopoly of the New World in the South 
which Spain had till now enjoyed, seemed at the time but a poor 
result for the vast expenditure of money and. blood. The war which 
the attack on San Domingo necessarily brought on saw the last and 
grandest of the triumphs of England^s first great admiral. Blake 
found the Plata fleet guarded by galleons in the strongly armed harbour 
of Santa Cruz. He forced an entrance into the harbour, sunk or 
burnt every ship in it, and worked his fleet out again in the teeth of a 
gale. His death, as the fleet touched at Plymouth on its return, alone 
damped the joy at this great victory. But Cromwell desired triumphs 
on land as on sea ; and his desire threw him blindfold into the hands of 
Mazarin, who was engaged on his part in the war with Spain which 
was brought afterwards to a close in the Treaty of the Pyrenees.. 
Cromwell's demand of Dunkirk, which had long stood in the way of 
any acceptance of his offers of aid, was at last conceded ; and a 
detachment of the Puritan army joined the French troops who were 
attacking Flanders under the command of Turenne. Their valour and 
discipline was shown by the part they took in the victory of the Dunes, 
a victory which forced the Flemish towns to open their gates to the 
French, and gave Dunkirk to Cromwell. 

Never had the fame of England stood higher ; and yet never had any 
English ruler committed so fatal a blunder as that of Cromwell in aiding 
the ambition of France. But the errors of his foreign policy were 
small in comparison with the errors of his pohcy at home. The 
government of the Protector had become a simple tyranny, but it was 
impossible for him to remain content with the position of a tyrant. 
He was as anxious as ever to give a legal basis to his administration ; 
and he seized on the war as a pretext for again summoning a Parlia- 
ment. But he no longer trusted, as in the ParHament of 1654, to 
perfect freedom of election. The sixty members sent from Ireland 
and Scotland were simply nominees of the Government. Its whole 
influence was exerted to secure the return of the more conspicuous 
members of the Council. All Catholics, and all Royalists who had 
actually fought for the King, we/'-^ still disqualified from voting. It was 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



577 



calculated that of the members returned one-half were bound to the 
Government by ties of profit or place. But Cromwell was still unsatis- 
fied. A certificate of the Council was required from each member before 
admission to the House; and a fourth of the whole number returned — 
one hundred in all, with Haslerig at their head — were by this means 
excluded on grounds of disaffection or want of religion. To these 
arbitrary acts of violence the House replied only by a course of 
singular moderation and wisdom. From the first it disclaimed any 
purpose of opposing the Government. One of its earliest acts 
provided securities for Cromwell's person, which was threatened 
by constant plots of assassination. It supported him in his war 
policy, and voted supplies of unprecedented extent for the main- 
tenance of the struggle. It was this attitude of loyalty which gave 
force to its steady refusal to sanction the system of tyranny 
which had practically placed England under martial law. In his 
opening address Cromwell boldly took his stand in support of the 
mihtary despotism wielded by the major-generals. " It hath been more 
effectual towards the discountenancing of vice and settling religion 
than anything done these fifty years. I will abide by it," he said, with 
singular vehemence, " notwithstanding the envy and slander of foolish 
men. I could as soon venture my life with it as with anything I ever 
undertook. If it were to be done again, I would do it." But no 
sooner had a bill been introduced into Parliament to confirm the 
proceedings of the major-generals than a long debate showed the 
temper of the Commons. They had resolved to acquiesce in the Pro- 
tectorate, but they were equally resolved to bring it again to a legal 
mode of government. This indeed was the aim of even Cromwell's 
wiser adherents. " What makes me fear the passing of this Act," one 
of them wrote to his son Henry, " is that thereby His Highness' 
government will be more founded in force, and more removed from 
that natural foundation which the people in Parliament are desirous 
to give him, supposing that he will become more theirs than now he 
is." The bill was rejected, and Cromwell bowed to the feeling of the 
nation by withdrawing the powers of the major-generals. But the 
defeat of the tyranny of the sword was only a step towards a far bolder 
effort for the restoration of the power of the law. It was no mere 
pedantry, still less was it vulgar flattery, which influenced the Parha- 
ment in their offer to Cromwell of the title of King. The experience 
of the last few years had taught the nation the value of the traditional 
forms under which its liberties had grown up. A king was limited 
by constitutional precedents. "The king's prerogative," it was well 
urged, " is under the courts of justice, and is bounded as well as any 
acre of land, or anything a man hath." A Protector, on the other 
hand, was new in our history, and there were no traditional means of 
limiting his power. " The one office being lawful in its nature," said 

P P 



578 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Glynne, "known to the nation, certain in itself, and confined and regu- 
lated by the law, and the other not so — that was the great ground 
why the ParHament did so much insist on this office and title. 
Under the name of Monarchy, indeed, the question really at issue 
between the party headed by the officers and the party led by the 
lawyers in the Commons was that of the restoration of constitutional 
and legal rule. The proposal was carried by an overwhelming majority, 
but a month passed in endless consultations between the Parliament 
and the Protector. His good sense, his knowledge of the general 
feeling of the nation, his real desire to obtain a settlement which should 
secure the ends for which Puritanism had fought, political and religious 
liberty, broke, in conference after conference, through a mist of words. 
But his real concern throughout was with the temper of the army. 
To Cromwell his soldiers were no common swordsmen. They were ' 
"godly men, men that will not be beaten down by a worldly and 
carnal spirit while they keep their integrity ; " men in whose general 
voice he recognized the voice of God. " They are honest and faithful 
men," he urged, " true to the great things of the Government. And 
though it really is no part of their goodness to be unwilling to submit 
to what a Parliament shall settle over them, yet it is my duty and 
conscience to beg of you that there may be no hard things put upon 
them which they cannot swallow. I cannot think God would bless 
an undertaking of anything which would justly and with cause grieve 
themo" The temper of the army was soon shown. Its leaders, with 
Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough at their head, placed their 
commands in CromwelFs hands. A petition from the officers to 
Parliament demanded the withdrawal of the proposal to restore the 
Monarchy, " in the name of the old cause for which they had bled." 
Cromwell at once anticipated the coming debate on this petition, 
debate which might have led to an open breach between the army^and 
the Commons, by a refusal of the Crown. " I cannot undertake this 
Government," he said, "with that title of King; and that is my answer 
to this great and weighty business." 

Disappointed as it was, the Parliament with singular self-restraint 
turned to other modes of bringing about its purpose. The offer of the 
Crown had been coupled with the condition of accepting a Constitu- 
tion, which was a modification of the Instrument of Government 
adopted by the Parliament of 1654, and this Constitution Cromwell 
emphatically approved. " The things provided by this Act of Govern- 
ment," he owned, " do secure the liberties of the people of God a^ they 
never before have had them." With a change of the title of Kii% into 
that of Protector, the Act of Government now became law : and the 
solemn inauguration of the Protector by the Parliament was a prac- 
tical acknowledgment on the part of Cromwell of the illegality of his 
former rule. In the name of the Commons the Speaker invested him 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



579 



with a mantle of State, placed the sceptre in his hand, and girt the 
sword of justice by his side. By the new Act of Government Crom- 
well was allowed to name his own successor, but in all after cases the 
office was to be an elective one. In every other respect the forms of 
the older Constitution were carefully restored. Parliament was,«again to 
consist of two Houses, the seventy members of " the other House " 
being named by the Protector. The Commons regained their old 
right of exclusively deciding on the qualification of their members. 
Parliamentary restrictions were imposed on the choice of members of 
the Council, and officers of State or of the army. A fixed revenue 
was voted to the Protector, and it was provided that no moneys should 
be raised but by assent of Parliament. Liberty of worship was secured 
for all but Papists, Prelatists, Socinians, or those who denied the 
inspiration of the Scriptures ; and liberty of conscience was secured 
for all. 

The excluded members were again admitted when the Parliament 
reassembled after an adjournment of six months ; and the hasty act 
of Cromwell in giving his nominees in "the other House" the title 
of Lords kindled a quarrel which was busily fanned by Haslerig. 
But while the Houses were busy with their squabble the hand of death 
was falling on the Protector. He had long been weary of his task. 
" God knows," he burst out a little time before to the Parliament, " I 
would have been glad to have lived under my woodside, 'and to have 
kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken this government." 
And now to the weariness of power was added the weakness and 
feverish impatience of disease. Vigorous and energetic as his life had 
seemed, his health was by no means as strong as his will ; he had been 
struck down by intermittent fever in the midst of his triumphs both in 
Scotland and in Ireland, and during the past year he had suffered from 
repeated attacks of it. " I have some infirmities upon me," he owned 
twice- over in his speech at the opening of the Parliament ; and his 
feverish irritability was quickened by the public danger. No supplies 
had been voted, and the pay of the army was heavily in arrear, while 
its temper grew more and more sullen at the appearance of the new 
Constitution and the reawakening of the Royalist intrigues. The con- 
tinuance of the Parliamentary strife threw Cromwell at last, says an 
observer at his court, " into a rage and passion like unto madness." 
Summoning his coach, by a sudden impulse, the Protector drove with 
a few 'guards to Westminster ; and, setting aside the remonstrances of 
Fle:.twood, summoned the two Houses to his presence. " I do dis- 
solve- this Parliament," he ended a speech of angry rebuke, "and let 
God be judge betv/een you and me." Fatal as was the error, for the 
moment all went well. The army was reconciled by the blow levelled at 
its- opponents, and the few murmurers were weeded from its ranks by 
a careful remodelhng. The triumphant officers vowed to stand or fall 

P P 2 



58c 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



with his Highness. The danger of a Royalist rising vanished before a 
host of addresses from the counties. Great news too came from abroad, 
where victory in Flanders, and the cession of Dunkirk, set the seal on 
Cromweirs glory. But the fever crept steadily on, and his looks told 
the tale of death to the Quaker, Fox, who met him riding in Hampton 
Court Park. " Before I came to him," he says, " as he rode at the 
head of his Life Guards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth 
against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dead man." 
In the midst of his triumph CromwelFs heart was in fact heavy with 
the sense of failure. He had no desire to play the tyrant ; nor had he 
any belief in the permanence of a mere tyranny. He had hardly dis- 
solved the Parliament before he was planning the summons of another, 
and angry at the opposition which his Council offered to the project. 
" I will take my own resolutions," he said gloomily to his house- 
hold ; " I can no longer satisfy myself to sit still, and make myself 
guilty of the loss of all the honest party and of the nation itself." 
But before his plans could be realized the overtaxed strength of the 
Protector suddenly gave way. He saw too clearly the chaos into 
which his death would plunge England to be willing to die. " Do not 
think I shall die," he burst out with feverish energy to the physicians 
who gathered round him ; " say not I have lost my reason ! I tell you 
the truth. I know it from better authority than any you can have from 
Galen or Hippocrates. It is the answer of God himself to our 
prayers ! " Prayer indeed rose from every side for his recovery, but 
death drew steadily nearer, till even Cromwell felt that his hour was 
come. " I would be willing to live," the dying man murmured, " to be 
further serviceable to God and his people, but my work is done ! Yet 
God will be with his people ! " A storm which tore roofs from houses, 
and levelled huge trees in every forest, seemed a fitting prelude to 
the passing away of his mighty spirit. Three days later, on the third 
of September, the day which had witnessed his victories of Worcester 
and Dunbar, Cromwell quietly breathed his last. 

So absolute even in death was his sway over the minds of men, that, 
to the wonder of the excited Royalists, even a doubtful nomination on 
his death-bed was enough to secure the peaceful succession of his son, 
Richard Cromwell. Many, in fact, who had rejected the authority of 
his father submitted peaceably to the new Protector. Their motives 
were explained by Baxter, the most eminent among the Presbyterian 
ministers, in the address to Richard which announced his adhesion. " I 
observe," he says, " that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable 
entrance upon the Government. Many are persuaded that you have been 
strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, 
that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you 
in that Temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, 
I though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly and 



VIII.] 



PURITAN ENGLAND, 



581 



made great wars." The new Protector was a weak and worthless man, 
but the bulk of the nation were content to be ruled by one who was at 
any rate no soldier, no Puritan, and no innovator. Richard was known 
to be lax and godless in his conduct, and he was beheved to be con- 
servative and even Royalist in heart. The tide of reaction was felt even 
in his Council. Their first act was to throw aside one of the greatest of 
CromwelFs reforms, and to fall back in the summons which they issued 
for the new Parliament on the old system of election. It was felt far 
more keenly in the tone of the new House of Commons. The repub- 
licans under Vane, backed adroitl}- by the RoyaHsts, fell hotly on 
Cromwell's system. The fiercest attack of all came from Sir Ashley 
Cooper, a Dorsetshire gentleman who had changed sides in the civil 
war, had fought for the King and then for the Parliament, had been a 
member of CromwelFs Council, and had of late ceased to be a member 
of it. His virulent invective on " his Highness of deplorable memory, 
who with fraud and force deprived you of your liberty when living and 
entailed slavery on you at his death," was followed by an equally 
virulent invective against the army. " They have not only subdued 
their enemies," said Cooper, " but the masters who raised and main- 
tained them ! They have not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, 
but rebellious England too ; and there suppressed a Malignant party of 
magistrates and laws." The army was quick with its reply. The Coun- 
cil of its officers demanded the appointment of a soldier as their General 
in the place of the new Protector, who had assumed the command. 
The Commons at once ordered the dismissal of all officers who refused 
to engage " not to disturb or interrupt the free meetings of Parliament ;" 
and Richard ordered the Council of Officers to dissolve. Their reply 
was a demand for the dissolution of the Parliament, a demand with 
which Richard was forced to comply. The great work of the army 
however was still to secure a settled government, and setting aside 
the new Protector, whose weakness was now evident, they resolved 
to fall back on the Parliament they had expelled from St. Stephen's, 
but which remained the one body that could put forward a legitimate 
claim to power. Of the one hundred and sixty members who had 
continued to sit after the King's death, about ninety returned to 
their seats, and resumed the administration of affairs. But the 
memory of the Expulsion made any trust in or reconciliation with the 
army impossible. In spite of Vane's counsels a reform of the officers 
was at once proposed, and though a Royalist rising in Cheshire under 
Sir George Booth threw the disputants for a moment together, the 
struggle revived as the danger passed away. A new hope indeed filled 
men^s minds. Not only was the nation sick of military rule, but the 
army, unconquerable so long as it held together, at last showed 
^igns of division ; and Haslerig was encouraged by the temper of 
the troops in Scotland and Ireland to demand the dismissal of Fleet- 



582 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



II 



wood and Lambert from their commands. They answered by driving 
the ParHament again from Westminster, and by marching to meet the 
army under Monk which was threatening to advance from Scotland to 
the South. Negotiation gave Monk time to gather a Convention at 
Edinburgh, and to strengthen himself with money and recruits. Then 
he advanced rapidly to Coldstream, and the cry of " a free Parliament " 
ran like fire through the country. Not only Fairfax, who appeared in 
arms in Yorkshire, but the ships on the Thames, and the mob which 
thronged the streets of London caught up the cry ; the army, thrown into 
confusion by its own divisions, strove to check the tide of feeling by 
recalling the Commons ,• and Monk, who lavished protestations af 
loyalty to that assembly, while he accepted petitions for a " Free m 
Parliament," entered London unopposed. From the moment of his- w 
entry the restoration of the Stuarts became inevitable. The army, 
resolute as it still remained for the maintenance of " the Cause," was 
deceived by Monk's declarations of loyalty to it, and rendered power- 
less by an adroit dispersion of the troops over the country. At the 
instigation of Ashley Cooper those who remained of the members wha 
had been excluded from the House of Commons by Pride's Purge> 
again forced their way into Parliament, and at once resolved on a dis- 
solution and the election of a new House of Commons. The new 
House, which bears the name of the Convention, had hardly taken 
the solemn League and Covenant which showed its Presbyterian tem- 
per, and its leaders had only begun to draw up terms on which a Royal 
restoration might be assented to, when they found that Monk had 
betrayed them, and was already in negotiation with the exiled Court. 
All exaction of terms was now impossible ; the Declaration of Breda,, 
in which Charles promised a general pardon, religious toleration, and 
satisfaction to the army, was received with a burst of national enthu- 
siasm ; and the old Constitution was restored by a solemn vote of the 
Convention, " that according to the ancient and fundamental laws of 
this Kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords, 
and Commons." The vote was hardly passed when Charles landed at 
Dover, and made his way amidst the shouts of a great multitude to 
Whitehall. " It is my own fault," laughed the new King, with charac- 
teristic irony, " that I had not come back sooner ; for I find nobody 
who does not tell me he has always longed for my return." 

Puritanism, so men believed, had fallen never to rise again. As a 
political experiment it had ended in utter failure and disgust. As a 
religious system of national life it brought about the wildest outbreak 
of moral revolt that England has ever witnessed. And yet Puritanism 
v/as far from being dead ; it drew indeed a nobler life from its very fall. 
Nothing aids us better to trace the real course of Puritan influence 
since the fall of Puritanism than the thought of the two great works 
which have handed down from one generation to another its highest 



VIIL] 



PURITAN ENGLAND. 



and noblest spirit. From that time to this the most poptilar of all reli- 
gious books has been the Puritan alleg-ory of the " Pilgrim's Progress." 
The most popular of all English poems has been the Puritan epic of 
the " Paradise Lost." Milton had been engaged during the civil war 
in strife with Presbyterians and with Royalists, pleading for civil and 
religious freedom, for freedom of social life, and freedom of the press. 
At a later time he became Latin Secretary to the Protector, in spite of a 
blindness which had been brought on by the intensity of his study. 
The Restoration found him of all living men the most hateful to the 
Roya.ists ; for it was his " Defence of the English People" which had 
justified throughout Europe the execution of the King. Parliament 
ordered his book to be burnt by the common hangman ; he was for a 
time imprisoned, and even when released he had to live amidst 
threads of assassination from fanatical Cavaliers. To the ruin of his 
cause were added personal misfortunes in the bankruptcy of the 
scrivener who held the bulk of his property, and in the Fire of London, 
which deprived him of much of what was left. As age drew on, he found 
himself reduced to comparative poverty, and driven to sell his library 
for subiistence. Even among the sectaries who shared his political 
opinions Milton stood in religious opinion alone, for he had gradually 
severed himself from every accepted form of faith, had embraced Arian- 
ism, and iiad ceased to attend at any place of worship. Nor was his 
home a hcppy one. The grace and geniality of his youth disappeared 
in the drulgery of a schoolmaster's life and amongst the invectives of 
controversy. In age his temper became stern and exacting. His 
daughters, wlo were forced to read to their blind father in languages 
which they coiid not understand, revolted utterly against their bondage. 
But solitude ani misfortune only brought out into bolder relief Milton's 
inner greatness. There was a grand simplicity in the life of his later 
years. He listeied every morning to a chapter of the Hebrew Bible, 
and after musing in silence for a while pursued his studies till mid- day. 
Then he took execise for an hour, played for another hour on the organ 
or viol, and renewed his studies. The evening was spent in converse 
with visitors and Hends. For lonely and unpopular as Milton was, 
there was one thing about him which made his house in Bunhill Fields 
a place of pilgrimage to the wits of the Restoration. He was the last 
of the Elizabethans. He had possibly seen Shakspere, as on his visits 
to London after his reirement to Stratford the playwright passed along 
Bread Street to his witcombats at the Mermaid. He had been the con- 
temporary of Webster and Massinger, of Herrick and Crashaw. His 
" Comus " and " Arcad>s " had rivalled the masques of Ben Jonson. It 
was with a reverence dravn from thoughts like these that Dryden looked 
on the blind poet aa he 5ate< clad in black, in his chamber hung with 
rusty green tapestry, his fair brown hair falling as of old over a calm; 
serene face that siill retiined much of its youthful beauty, his cheeks 



584 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



delicately coloured, his clear grey eyes showing no trace of their 
blindness. But famous, whether for good or ill, as his prose writings 
had made him, during fifteen years only a few sonnets had broken his 
silence as a singer. It was now, in his blindness and old age, with 
the cause he loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the rabble in 
" Comus," that the genius of Milton took refuge in the great poem on 
which through years of silence his imagination had still been brooding. 
On his return from his travels in Italy, Milton spoke of himself 
as musing on "a work not to be raised from the heat of youtli or 
the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen 
of some vulgar amourist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, 
nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren 
daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can 
enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his SerapMm, 
with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom 
He pleases." His lips were touched at last. Seven years after the 
Restoration appeared the " Paradise Lost," and four years later the 
" Paradise Regained" and ^' Samson Agonistes, in the severe grandeur 
of whose verse we see the poet himself " fallen," like Samson, " on 
evil days and evil tongues, with darkness and with danger compassed 
round." But great as the two last works were, their greatness was 
eclipsed by that of their predecessor. The whole genius of Milton 
expressed itself in the " Paradise Lost." The romance, the gorgeous 
fancy, the daring imagination which he shared with the El^abethan 
poets, the large but ordered beauty of form which he ha<i drunk in 
from the literature of Greece and Rome, the sublimity of conception, 
the loftiness of phrase which he owed to the Bible, bonded in this 
story "of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of t^at forbidden 
tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the worU and all our 
woe." It is only when we review the strangely miigled elements 
which make up the poem, that we realize the geniis which fused 
them into such a perfect whole. The meagre outline of the Hebrew 
legend is lost in the splendour and music of Milpn's verse. The 
stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in the gorg^us robes of the 
Renascence. If we miss something of the free play of Spenser's 
fancy, and yet more of the imaginative delight in /leir own creations 
which gives so exquisite a life to the poetry of tie early dramatists, 
we find in place of these the noblest example ivhich our literature 
affords of the ordered majesty of classic form, ^ut it is not with the 
literary value of the " Paradise Lost " that we'are here concerned. 
Its historic importance lies in this, that it is m Epic of Puritanism. 
Its scheme is the problem with which the Puriftn wrestled in hours of 
gloom and darkness, the problem of sin a/d redemption, of the 
world-wide struggle of evil against good. The intense moral con- 
centration of the Puritan had given an almostpodily shape to spiritual 



VIII.] 



PURITAN- ENGLAND, 



585 



abstractions before Milton gave life and being to the forms of Sin and 
Death. It was the Puritan tendency to mass into one vast "body of 
sin " the various forms of human evil, and by the very force of a 
passionate hatred to exaggerate their magnitude and their power, to 
which we owe the conception of Milton's Satan. The greatness of 
the Puritan aim in the long and wavering struggle for justice and law.^ 
and a higher good ; the grandeur of character which the contest 
developed ; the colossal forms of good and evil which moved over 
i its stage ; the debates and conspiracies and battles which had been 
men's life for twenty years ; the mighty eloquence and mightier ambi- 
tion which the war had roused into being — all left their mark on the 
" Paradise Lost." Whatever was highest and best in the Puritan 
temper spoke in the nobleness and elevation of the poem, in its 
I purity of tone, in its grandeur of conception, in its ordered and 
; equable realization of a great purpose. Even in his boldest flights, 
I Milton is calm and master of himself. His touch is always sure. 
Whether he passes from Heaven to Hell, or from the council hall of 
, Satan to the sweet conference of Adam and Eve, his tread is steady 
' and unfaltering. But if the poem expresses the higher qualities of the 
I Puritan temper, it expresses no less exactly its defects. Throughout 
I it we feel almost painfully a want of the finer and subtler sympathies, 
j of a large and genial humanity, of a sense of spiritual mystery. 
Dealing as Milton does with subjects the most awful and mysterious 
j that poet ever chose, he is never troubled by the obstinate questionings 
of invisible things which haunted the imagination of Shakspere. We 
look in vain for any ^schylean background of the vast unknown, 
i " Man's disobedience " and the scheme for man's redemption are laid 
; down as clearly and with just as little mystery as in a Puritan dis- 
: course. On topics such as these, even God the Father (to borrow 
Pope's sneer) " turns a school divine." As in his earlier poems he had 
I ordered and arranged nature, so in the " Paradise Lost " Milton orders 
I and arranges Heaven and Hell. His mightiest figures. Angel or 
I Archangel, Satan or Belial, stand out colossal but distinct. There is 
' just as little of the wide sympathy with all that is human which is so 
I loveable in Chaucer and Shakspere. On the contrary the Puritan in- 
I dividuality is nowhere so overpowering as in Milton. He leaves the 
I stamp of himself deeply graven on all he creates. We hear his voice 
i in every line of his poem. The cold, severe conception of moral 
i virtue which reigns throughout it, the intellectual way in which he 
! paints and regards beauty (for the beauty of Eve is a beauty which no 
I mortal man may love) are Milton's own. We feel his inmost temper in 
I the stoical self-repression which gives its dignity to his figures. Adam 
I utters no cry of agony when he is driven from Paradise. Satan 
siiffers in a defiant silence. It is to this intense self-concentration 
that we must attribute the strange denciency of humour which Milton 



586 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



shared with the Puritans generally, and which here and there breaks 
the sublimity of his poem with strange slips into the grotesque. But 
it is above all to this Puritan deficiency in human sympathy that we 
must attribute his wonderful want of dramatic genius. Of the power 
which creates a thousand different characters, which endows each 
with its appropriate act and word, which loses itself in its own creations, 
no great poet ever had less. 

The poem of Milton was the epic of a fallen cause. The broken 
hope, which had seen the Kingdom of the Saints pass like a dream 
away, spoke in its very name. Paradise was lost once more, when 
the New Model, which embodied the courage and the hope of Puri- 
tanism, laid down its arms. In his progress to the capital Charles 
passed in review the soldiers assembled on Blackheath. Betrayed by 
their general, abandoned by their leaders, surrounded as they were by a 
nation in arms, the gloomy silence of their ranks awed even the careless 
King with a sense of danger. But none of the victories of the New 
Model were so glorious as the victory which it won over itself Quietly, 
and without a struggle, as men who bowed to the inscrutable will of 
God, the farmers and traders who had dashed Rupert's chivalry to 
pieces on Naseby field, who had scattered at Worcester the " army of the 
aliens," and driven into helpless fxight the sovereign that now came " to 
enjoy his own again," who had renewed beyond sea the glories of Cressy 
and Agincourt, had mastered the Parliament, had brought a King to 
justice and the block, had given laws to England, and held even 
Cromwell in awe, became farmers and traders again, and were known 
among their fellow-men by no other sign than their greater soberness 
and industry. And, with them, Puritanism laid down the sword. It 
ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force 
and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom 
of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from 
the moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as 
the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing 
that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. 
The revels of Whitehall, the scepticism and debauchery of courtiers^ 
the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what 
Puritanism had made them, serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, 
firm in their love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution 
of 1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty which it had failed to 
do in that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the revival 
of the eighteenth century th^ work of religious reform which its 
earlier efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly but 
steadily it introduced its own seriousness and purity into English 
society, English literature, English politics. The whole history of 
English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual 
sides, has been the history of Puritanism. 



rx.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



587 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE REVOLUTION, 

( 

Section I.— England and the Revolution. 

[Authoiities, — For the social change see the Memoirs of Pepys and Evelyn, 
the dramatic works of Wycherley and Etherege, and Lord Macaulay's * * Essay 
on the Dramatists of the Restoration." The fullest account of Lord Bacon will 
be found in his **Life and Letters," now being published with his " Works," 
by Mr. Spedding, whose apologetic tones may be contrasted with the verdict 
of Lord Macaulay (** Essay on Lord Bacon") and with the more judicious 
jjudgment of Mr. Gardner (** History of England," and *'The wSpanish 
'Marriage"). The fairest estimate of his position in the history of Science 
will be found in Mr. Lewes's " History of Philosophy." For the earlier 
jhistory of English Science see Hallam's sketch ('^Literaiy History," vol. 
iv.) ; the histories of the Royal Society by Thompson or Wade; and Sir D. 
I Brewster's biography of Newton. Sir W. Molesworth has edited the works 
I of Hobbes.] 

I ^^. 

No event ever marked a deeper or a more lasting change in the 

temper of the English people than the entry of Charles the Second 

into Whitehall. With it modern England begins. Influences which 

had up to this time moulded our history, the theological influence of 

i the Reformation, the monarchical influence of the new kingship, the 

I feudal influence of the Middle Ages, the yet earlier influence of tradition 

and custom, suddenly lost power over the minds of men. We find 

ourselves all at once among the great currents of thought and activity 

I which have gone on widening and deepening from that time to this. 

I The England around us is our own England, an England whose chief 

forces are industry and science, the love of popular freedom and of 

law, an England which presses steadily forward to a larger social 

justice and equality, and which tends more and more to bring every 

j custom and tradition, religious, intellectual, and political, to the test 

I of pure reason. Between modern thought, on some at least of its 

more important sides, and the thought of men before the Restoration 

there is a gi'eat gulf fixed. A political thinker in the present day 

would find it equally hard to discuss any point of statesmanship with 

Lord B irleigh or with Oliver Cromwell. He would find no point of 

contact between their ideas of national life or national welfare, their 

conception of government or the ends of government, their mode of, 

regarding economical and social questions, and his own. But no gulf 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of this sort parts us from the men who followed the Restoration. 
From that time to this, whatever differences there may have been as 
to practical conclusions drawn from them, there has been a substantial 
agreement as to the grounds of our political, our social, our intellectual 
and religious life. Paley would have found no difficulty in under- 
standing Tillotson : Newton and Sir Humphry Davy could have 
talked without a sense of severance. There would have been nothing 
to hinder a perfectly clear discussion on government or law between 
John Locke and Jeremy Bentham. 

The change from the old England to the new is so startling that 
we are apt to look on it as a more sudden change than it really was, 
and the outer aspect of the Restoration does much to strengthen this 
impression of suddenness. The aim of the Puritan had been to set up 
a visible Kingdom of God upon earth. He had wrought out his aim 
by reversing the policy of the Stuarts and the Tudors. From the 
time of Henry the Eighth to the time of Charles the First, the Church 
had been looked upon primarily as an instrument for securing, by 
moral and religious influences, the social and political ends of the 
State. Under the Commonwealth, the State, in its turn, was regardedj 
primarily as an instrument for securing through its political and socia 
influences the moral and religious ends of the Church. In the Puritan 
theory. Englishmen were " the Lord's people ; " a people dedicated to 
Him by a solemn Covenant, and whose end as a nation was to carryl 
out His will. For such an end it was needful that rulers, as well as 
people, should be "godly men." Godliness became necessarily the 
chief qualification for public employment. The new modelling of the 
army filled its ranks with " saints.'^ Parliament resolved to employ no 
man "but such as the House shall be satisfied of his real godliness." 
The Covenant which bound the nation to God bound it to enforce 
God's laws even more earnestly than its own. The Bible lay on the 
table of the House of Commons ; and its prohibition of swearing, of 
drunkenness, of fornication became part of the law of the land. 
Adultery was made felony without the benefit of clergy. Pictures 
whose subjects jarred with the new decorum were ordered to be burnt, 
and statues were chipped ruthlessly into decency. It was in the same 
temper that Puritanism turned from public life to private. The 
Covenant bound not the whole nation only, but every individual 
member of the nation, to " a jealous God," a God jealous of any 
superstition that robbed him of the w^orship which was exclusively 
his due, jealous of the distraction and frivolity which robbed him of 
the entire devotion of man to His service. The want of poetry, of 
fancy, in the common Puritan temper condemned half the popular 
observances of England as superstitions. It was superstitious to keep 
Christmas, or to deck the house with holly and ivy. It w^as super- 
stitious to dance round the village maypole. It was flat Popery to eat 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



589 



a mince-pie. The rough sport, the mirth and fun of "merry England," 
were out of place in an England called with so great a calling. Bull- 
baiting, bear-baiting, horse-racing, cock-fighting, the village revel, the 
dance on the village green, were put down with the same indiscrimin- 
ating severity. The long struggle between the Puritans and the play- 
wrights ended in the closing of every theatre. 

The Restoration brought Charles to Whitehall : and in an instant the 
whole face of England was changed. All that was noblest and best 
in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and its tyranny in 
the current of the nation's hate. Religion had been turned into a poli- 
cal and a social tyranny, and it fell with their fall. Godliness became a 
by-word of scorn ; sobriety in dress, in speech, in manners was flouted 
as a mark of the detested Puritanism. Butler, in his ^' Hudibras," 
poured insult on the past with a pedantic buffoonery for which the 
general hatred, far more than its humour, secured a hearing. Archbishop 
Sheldon listened to the mock sermon of a Cavalier who held up the 
Puritan phrase and the Puritan twang to ridicule in his hall atLambeth. 
DuelHng and raking became the marks of a fine gentleman ; and grave 
divines winked at the follies of " honest fellows," who fought, gambled, 
swore, drank, and ended a day of debauchery by a night in the gutter. 
The life of a man of fashion vibrated between frivolity and excess. One 
' of the comedies of the time tells the courtier that " he must dress well, 
dance well, fence well, have a talent for love letters, an agreeable voice, 
be amorous and discreet — but not too constant." But to graces such 
as these the rakes of the Restoration added a shamelessness and a 
brutality which passes belief. Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, 
and the titles of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day 
could copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness 
of his words made even the porters of Covent Garden pelt him from 
the balcony when he ventured to address them. The truest type of 
the time is the Duke of Buckingham, and the most characteristic event 
in the Duke's life was a duel in which he consummated his seduction 
of Lady Shrewsbury by killing her husband, while the Countess in 
disguise as a page held his horse for him and looked on at the murder. 
Vicious as the stage was, it only reflected the general vice of the time. 
The Comedy of the Restoration borrowed everything from the Comedy 
of France save the poetry, the delicacy, and good taste which veiled 
its grossness. Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism, debauchery, 
found fitting expression in dialogue of a studied and deliberate foulness, 
which even its wit fails to redeem from disgust. Wycherley, the first 
dramatist of the time, remains the most brutal among all writers for 
the stage ; and nothing gives so damning an impression of his day as 
the fact that he found actors to repeat his words and audiences to ap- 
plaud them. In men such as Wycherley Milton found types for the 
Belial of his great poem, " than whom a spirit more lewd fell not from 



Sec. I. 
England 

AND 

THE Revo- 
lution. 



The 
Revolt of 

the 
Restora* 

tion. 



590 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Heaven, or more gross to love vice for itself." He piques himself on 
the frankness and " plain dealing " which painted the world as he saw 
it, a world of brawls and assignations, of orgies at Vauxhall, and fights 
with the watch, of hes and double-entendres, of knaves and dupes, of 
men who sold their daughters, and women who cheated their husbands. 
But the cynicism of Wycherley was no greater than that of the men 
about him ; and in mere love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue 
and disbehef in purity or honesty, the King himself stood ahead of 
any of his subjects. 

It is easy however to exaggerate the extent of this reaction. So far 
as we can judge from the memoirs of the time, its more violent forms 
were practically confined to the capital and the Court. The mass of 
Englishmen were satisfied with getting back their maypoles and mince- 
pies ; and a large part of the people remained Puritan in life and 
belief, though they threw aside many of the outer characteristics of 
Puritanism. Nor was the revolution in feeling as sudden as it seemed. 
Even if the political strength of Puritanism had remained unbroken, 
its social influence must soon have ceased. The young Englishmen 
who grew up in the midst of civil war knew nothing of the bitter 
tyranny which gave its zeal and fire to the religion of their fathers. 
From the social and religious anarchy around them, from the endless 
controversies and discussions of the time, they drank in the spirit 
of scepticism, of doubt, of free inquiry. If religious enthusiasm had 
broken the spell of ecclesiastical tradition, its own extravagance 
broke the spell of religious enthusiasm ; and the new generation 
turned in disgust to try forms of political government and spiritual 
belief by the cooler and less fallible test of reason. It is easy to see 
the rapid spread of such a tendency even in the families of the leading 
Puritans. Neither of CromwelFs sons made any pretensions to religion. 
Cromwell himself in his later years felt bitterly that Puritanism had 
missed its aim. He saw the country gentleman, alienated from it 
by the despotism it had brought in its train, alienated perhaps 
even more by the appearance of a religious freedom for which he was 
unprepared, drifting into a love of the older Church that he had once op- 
posed. He saw the growth of a dogged resistance in the people at large. 
The attempt to secure spiritual results by material force had failed, 
as it always fails. It broke down before the indifference and resent- 
ment of the great mass of the people, of men who were neither lawless 
nor enthusiasts, but who clung to the older traditions of social order, 
and whose humour and good sense revolted alike from the artificial 
conception of human life which Puritanism had formed and from its 
effort to force such a conception on a people by law. It broke down, 
too, before the corruption of the Puritans themselves. It was impossible 
1 to distinguish between the saint and the hypocrite as soon as godli- 
I ness became profitable. Ashley Cooper, a sceptic in religion and a pro- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



59r 



fligate in morals, was among " the loudest bagpipes of the squeaking I 
train." Even amongst the really earnest Puritans prosperity disclosed i 
a pride, a worldliness, a selfish hardness which had been hidden 
in the hour of persecution. The tone of CromwelFs later speeches 
shows his consciousness that the ground was slipping from under his 
feet. He no longer dwells on the dream of a Puritan England, of a 
nation rising as a whole into a People of God. He falls back on the 
phrases of his youth, and the saints become again a " peculiar people," 
a remnant, a fragment among th© nation at large. But the influences 
which were really foihng CromwelFs aim, and forming beneath his eyes 
the new England from which he turned in despair, were influences 
whose power he can hardly have recognized. Even before the out- 
burst of the Civil War a small group of theological Latitudinarians 
had gathered round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. In the very year 
when the King's standard was setup at Nottingham, Hobbes published 
the first of his works on Government. The last Royalist had only just 
laid down his arms when the little company who were at a later time 
to be known as the Royal Society gathered round Wilkins at Oxford. 
It is in this group of scientific observers that we catch the secret of 
the coming generation. From the spiritual problems with which it had 
so long wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world 
around it, to the observation of its phenomena, to the discovery of the 
laws which govern them. The pursuit of Physical Science became a 
passion ; and its method of research, by observation, comparison, and 
experiment, transformed the older methods of inquiry in matters with- 
out its pale. In religion, in politics, in the study of man and of 
nature, not faith but reason, not tradition but inquiry, were to be the 
watchwords of the coming time. The dead-weight of the past was 
suddenly rolled away, and the new England heard at last and under- 
stood the call of Francis Bacon. 

If in our notice of the Elizabethan literature we omitted all mention 
of Lord Bacon, it is because the scientific influence of Bacon told 
not on the age of Elizabeth but on the age of the Restoration. " For 
my name and memory," he said at the close of his life, " I leave it to 
men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age." 
It was to the " next age " too that, in spite of the general sense of his 
wisdom and ability, the scientific method of Bacon really made its 
first appeal. What belonged to his own time was the poorest and 
meanest part of him. Francis Bacon was bom at the opening of 
Elizabeth's reign, three years before the birth of Shakspere. He 
was the younger son of a Lord Keeper, as well as the nephew of 
Lord Burleigh, and even in boyhood his quickness and sagacity won 
the favour of the Queen. Elizabeth " dehghted much to confer with 
him, and to prove him with questions : unto which he delivered himself 
with that gravity and maturity above his years that her Majesty would 



Sec. I. 



592 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



often term him ' the young Lord Keeper.' " His earlier hopes of Court 
success, however, were soon dashed to the ground. He was left poor 
by his father's death ; the ill-will of the Cecils barred his advance- 
ment with the Queen : and a few years before Shakspere's arrival in 
London he entered at Gray's Inn, and soon became one of the most suc- 
cessful lawyers of the time. At twenty-three he was a member of the 
House of Commons, and his judgment and eloquence at once brought 
him to the front. " The fear of every man that heard him was lest he 
should make an end," Ben Jonson tells us. The steady growth of his 
reputation was quickened by the appearance of his " Essays," a work 
remarkable, not merely for the condensation of its thought and its 
felicity and exactness of expression, but for the power with which 
it appHed to human life that experimental analysis which Bacon was 
at a later time to make the key of Science. His fame at once became 
great at home and abroad, but with this nobler fame Bacon could not 
content himself. He was conscious of great powers, as well as great 
aims for the public good ; and it was a time when such aims could 
hardly be realized save through the means of the Crown. But political 
employment seemed farther off than ever. At the outset of his 
career in Parliament he had irritated Elizabeth by a free opposition to 
her demand of a subsidy ; and though the offence was atoned for by 
profuse apologies, and by the cessation of all further resistance to the 
policy of the Court, the law offices of the Crown were more than 
once refused to him, and it was only after the publication of his 
"Essays" that he could obtain some slight promotion as a Oueen'^s 
Counsel. The moral weakness which at once disclosed itself is 
perhaps the best justification of the Queen in her reluctance — a 
reluctance so strangely in contrast with her ordinary course — to bring 
the wisest head in her realm to her Council-board. The men whom 
Elizabeth employed were for the most part men whose intellect was 
directed by a strong sense of public duty. Their reverence for the 
Queen, strangely exaggerated as it may seem to us, was guided and 
controlled by an ardent patriotism and an earnest sense of religion ; 
and with all their regard for the Royal prerogative, they never lost their 
regard for the law. The grandeur and originality of Bacon's intellect 
parted him from men like these quite as much as the bluntness of his 
moral perceptions. In politics, as in science^ he had little reverence 
for the past. Law, constitutional privileges, or religion, were to him 
simply means of bringing about certain ends of good government ; and 
if these ends could be brought about in shorter fashion he saw only 
pedantry in insisting on more cumbrous means. He had great 
social and political ideas to realize, the reform and codification of 
the law, the civilization of Ireland, the purification of the Church, the 
union — at a later time — of Scotland and England, educational projects, 
projects of material improvement, and the like ; and the direct and 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



593 



sliortest way of realizing these ends was in Bacon's eyes the use of the 
power of the Crown. But Avhatever charm such a conception of the 
Royal power might have for her successor, it seems to have had little 
charm for Elizabeth ; nor was her nature likely to be won by the servility 
with which Bacon strove to improve his new opportunity of advance- 
ment. Partly, perhaps, from rivalry with the Cecils, but certainly in 
great part from his appreciation of Bacon's pov/er, Lord Essex had 
steadily backed his efforts after promotion ; and his disappointment in 
them had been alleviated by the Earl's generous present of an estate 
worth (in our money) some twelve thousand pounds. Bacon showed a 
true friendship for Essex by dissuading him from the career of opposi- 
tion which at last brought him to the block ; but every tie of friendship 
; and gratitude was forgotten when he appeared as Queen's Counsel to 
; support the charge of treason at the Earl's trial. He aggravated and 
pressed home the charge with his whole energy and skill ; and 
accepted a large gift from the court for his later service in publishing 
a garbled account of the "practices and treasons" of his friend. 
But Ehzabeth still remained cold to his advances ; and it was not till 
^the accession of James that the rays of Royal favour broke slowly 
(Upon him. He became successively Solicitor and Attorney- General ; 
,|the year of Shakspere's death saw him called to the Privy Council ; 
he verified Elizabeth's prediction by becoming Lord Keeper. At last 
)the goal of his ambition was reached. He had attached himself to 
Ihe rising fortunes of Buckingham, and the favour of Buckingham 
.made him Lord Chancellor. He was raised to the peerage as Baron 
Verulam, and created, at a later time. Viscount St. Albans. But the 
^nobler dreams for which these meaner honours had been sought 
^escaped his grasp. His projects still remained projects, while Bacon to 
Jretain his hold on office was stooping to a miserable compliance with 
^the worst excesses of Buckingham and his Royal master. The years 
iduring which he held the Chancellorship were the most disgraceful 
Ijy^ars of a disgraceful reign. They saw the execution of Raleigh, the 
sacrifice of the Palatinate, the exaction of benevolences, the multi- 
'phcation of monoplies, the supremacy of Buckingham. Against none 
lof the acts of folly and wickedness which distinguished James's 
government did Bacon do more than protest ; in some of the worst, 
jand above all in the attempt to coerce the judges into prostrating law 
lat the King's feet, he took a personal part. But even his remonstrances 
were too much for the young favourite, who regarded him as the mere 
i creature of his will. It was in vain that Bacon flung himself at the 
Duke's feet, and begged him to pardon a single instance of opposition 
jto his caprice. A Parliament was impending, and Buckingham resolved 
|:o avert from himself the storm which was gathering by sacrificing to 
lit his meaner dependants. To ordinary eyes the Chancellor was at 
^the summit of human success. Jonson had just sung of him as one 



594 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 
England 

AND 

THE Revo- 
lution. 



The 

Novum 

Crganuin. 



1626. 



ifx)5. 



" whose even thread the Fates spin round and full out of their choicest 
and their whitest wool/' when the storm burst. The great Parliament 
of 1620 met after a silence of six disgraceful years, and one of its first 
acts was to charge Bacon with corruption in the exercise of his office. 
He at once pleaded guilty to the charge. " I do plainly and ingen- 
uously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all 
defence." " I beseech your Lordships," he added, " to be merciful to 
a broken reed." The heavy fine imposed on him was remitted by the 
Crown ; but the Great Seal was taken from him, and he was declared 
incapable of holding office in the State or of sitting in Parliament. 

Bacon's fall restored him to that position of real greatness from 
which his ambition had so long torn him away. " My conceit of his 
person," said Ben Jonson, " was never increased towards him by his 
place or honours. But I have and do reverence him for his greatness 
that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever by his 
work one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that 
had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God would 
give him strength : for greatness he could not want." His intellectual 
activity was never more conspicuous than in the last four years of 
his life. He began a digest of the laws, and a " History of England 
under the Tudors," revised and expanded his " Essays," dictated a jest 
book, and busied himself with experiments in physics. It was while 
studying the effect of cold in preventing animal putrefaction that he 
stopped his coach to stuff a fowl with snow and caught the fever which 
ended in his death. The great work of his life remained a fragment 
to the last. Even as a boy at College he had expressed his dislike of 
the Aristotelean philosophy, as "a philosophy only strong for disputa- 
tions and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the 
benefit of the life of man." As a law-student of twenty-one he sketched 
in a tract on the " Greatest Birth of Time " the system of inductive 
inquiry he was already prepared to substitute for it. At forty-four, 
after the final disappointment of his political hopes from Elizabeth, the 
publication of the "Advancement of Learning" marked the first decisive 
appearance of the new philosophy. The close of this work was, in his 
own words, " a general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an 
inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and 
converted by the industry of man ; to the end that such a plot, made 
and recorded to memory, may both minister light to any public desig- | 
nation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." It was only by 
such a survey, he held, that men could be turned from useless studies, 
or ineffectual means of pursuing more useful ones, and directed to the 
true end of knowledge as ^^ a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator 
and the rehef of man's estate." Two years later appeared his " Cogi- ! 
tata et Visa," a first sketch of the " Novum Grganum," which in its com- 
plete form was presented to James immediately before Bacon's falL 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



595 



The year after his fall he produced his " Natural and Experimental 
History." This, with the " Novum Organum " and the " Advancement of 
Learning," was all of his projected " Instauratio Magna '* which he was 
destined to complete — and even of this portion we have only part of 
the last two divisions. The ^' Ladder of the Understanding," which 
was to have followed these and led up from experience to science, the 
*' Anticipations," or provisional hypotheses for the inquiries of the new 
philosophy, and the closing account of " Science in Practice " were left 
for posterity to bring to completion. "We may, as we trust," said 
Bacon, " make no despicable beginnings. The destinies of the human 
race must complete it, in such a manner perhaps as men looking only 
at the present world would not readily conceive. For upon this will 
depend, not only a speculative good, but all the fortunes of mankind, 
and all their power." When we turn from words like these to the actual 
work which Bacon did, it is hard not to feel a certain disappoint- 
ment. He did not thoroughly understand the older philosophy which 
he attacked. His revolt from the waste of human intelligence which 
he conceived to be owing to the adoption of a false method of investi- 
gation blinded him to the real value of deduction as an instrument of 
discovery ; and he was encouraged in his contempt for it as much by 
his own ignorance of mathematics as by the non-existence in his day 
of the great deductive sciences of physics and astronomy. Nor had 
he a more accurate prevision of the method of modern science. The 
inductive process to which he exclusively directed men's attention bore 
no fruit in Bacon's hands. The " art of investigating nature " on which 
he prided himself has proved useless for scientific purposes, and would 
be rejected by modern investigators. Where he was on a more correct 
track he can hardly be regarded as original. " It may be doubted," says 
Dugald Stewart, " whether any one important rule with regard to the 
true method of investigation be contained in his works of which no 
hint can be traced in those of his predecessors." Not only indeed did 
Bacon fail to anticipate the methods of modern science^ but he even re- 
jected the great scientific discoveries of his own day. He set aside with 
the same scorn the astronomical theory of Copernicus and the magnetic 
investigations of Gilbert, and the contempt seems to have been fully 
returned. " The Lord Chancellor wrote on science," said Harvey, the 
discoverer of the circulation of the blood, " like a Lord Chancellor.'^ 

In spite however of his inadequate appreciation either of the old 
philosophy or the new, the almost unanimous voice of later ages has 
attributed, and justly attributed, to the " Novum Organum" a decisive 
influence on the developement of modem science. If he failed in 
revealing the method of experimental research, Bacon was the first to 
proclaim the existence of a Philosophy of Science, to insist on the 
unity of knowledge and inquiry throughout the physical world, to give 
dignity by the large and noble temper in which he treated them to the 

Q Q2 



596 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 
England 

AND 

THE Revo- 
lution. 



petty details of experiment in which science had to begin, to clear a 
way for it by setting scornfully aside the traditions of the past, to claim 
for it its true rank and value, and to point to the enormous results 
which its culture would bring in increasing the power and happiness 
of mankind. In one respect his attitude was in the highest degree 
significant. The age in which he lived was one in which theology 
was absorbing the intellectual energy of the world. He was the 
servant, too, of a king with whom theological studies superseded aU 
others. But if he bowed in all else to James, Bacon would not, like 
Casaubon, bow in this. He would not even, like Descartes, attempt 
to transform theology by turning reason into a mode of theological 
demonstration. He stood absolutely aloof from it. Though as a 
politician he did not shrink from dealing with such subjects as 
Church Reform, he dealt with them simply as matters of civil poHty. 
But from his exhaustive enumeration of the branches of human 
knowledge he excluded theology, and theology alone. His method 
was of itself inapplicable to a subject, v/here the premisses were 
assumed to be certain, and the results known. His aim was to seek 
for unknown results by simple experiment. It was against received 
authority and accepted tradition in matters of inquiry that his whole 
system protested ; what he urged was the need of making belief rest 
strictly on proof, and proof rest on the conclusions drawn from evidence 
by reason. But in theology — all theologians asserted — reason played 
but a subordinate part. '^ If I proceed to treat of it," said Bacon, " I 
shall step out of the bark of human reason, and enter into the ship of 
the Church. Neither will the stars of philosophy, which have hitherto 
so nobly shone on us, any longer give us their light." The certainty 
indeed of conclusions on such subjects was out of harmony with the 
grandest feature of Bacon's work, his noble confession of the liability 
of every inquirer to error. It was his especial task to warn men 
against the " vain shows " of knowledge which had so long hindered 
any real advance in it, the " idols " of the Tribe, the Den, the Forum, 
and the Theatre, the errors which spring from the systematizing spirit 
which pervades all masses of men, or from individual idiosyncracies, 
or from the strange power of words and phrases over the mind, or from 
the traditions of the past. Nor were the claims of theology easily to 
be reconciled with the position which he was resolute to assign to 
natural science. " Through all those ages," Bacon says, " wherein men 
of genius or learning principally or even moderately flourished, the 
smallest part of human industry has been spent on natural philosophy, 
though this ought to be esteemed as the great mother of the sciences : 
for all the rest, if torn from this root, may perhaps be polished and 
formed for use, but can receive little increase." It was by the adoption 
of the method of inductive inquiry which physical science was to 
make its own, and by basing inquiry on the ground which physical 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



science could supply, that the moral sciences, ethics and pohtics, could 
alone make any real advance. " Let none expect any great promotion 
of the sciences, especially in their effective part, unless natural philo- 
sophy be drawn out to particular sciences ; and, again, unless these 
particular sciences be brought back again to natural philosophy. From 
this defect it is that astronomy, optics, music, many mechanical arts, j 
and (what seems stranger) even moral and civil philosophy and logic 
rise but little above the foundations, and only skim over the varieties 
and surfaces of things." 

It was this lofty conception of the position and destiny of natural 
science which Bacon was the first to impress upon mankind at large. 
The age was one in which knowledge, as we have seen, was passing to 
fields of inquiry which had till then been unknown, in which Kepler and 
Galileo were creating modern astronomy, in which Descartes was re- 
vealing the laws of motion, and Harvey the circulation of the blood. 
But to the mass of men this great change was all but imperceptible ; and 
it was the energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon 
which first called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and 
importance of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in 
the results and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to 
a zeal and confidence equal to his own. It was he who above all gave 
dignity to the slow and patient processes of investigation, of experi- 
ment, of comparison, to the sacrificing of hypothesis to fact, to the 
single aim after truth, which was to be the law of modern science. But, 
in England at least. Bacon stood — as we have said — before his age. 
The beginnings of physical science were more slow and timid there 
than in any country of Europe. Only two discoveries of any real 
value came from English research before the Restoration ; the first, i 
Gilbert's discovery of terrestrial magnetism in the close of Elizabeth's 
reign ; the next, the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, 
which was taught by Harvey in the reign of James. But apart from 
' these illustrious names England took little share in the scientific move- 
ment of the continent ; and her v/hole energies seemed to be whirled 
, into the vortex of theology and politics by the Civil War. But the war 
had not reached its end when a little group of students were to be seen 
Mn London, men "inquisitive," says one of them, "into natural philo- 
Isophy and other parts of human learning, and particularly of what 
hath been called the New Philosophy. . . . which from the times of 
, Galileo at Florence, and Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam) in England, 
hath been much cultivated in Italy, France, Germany, and other parts 
abroad, as well as with us in England." The strife of the time indeed 
j aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries. " To have 
I been always tossing about some theological question," says the first his- 
torian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, " would have been to have 
jmade that their private diversion, the excess of which they disliked in 



598 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



\ 



the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business and the 
distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. It was 
nature alone which could pleasantly entertain them in that estate." 
Foremost in the group stood Doctors WaUis and Wilkins, whose re- 
moval to Oxford, which had just been reorganized by the Puritan 
Visitors, divided the Uttle company into two societies. The Oxford 
society, which was the more important of the two, held its meetings at 
the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, who had become Warden of Wadham, 
College, and added to the names of its members that of the eminent I 
naathematician Dr. Ward, and that of the first of English economists, I 
Sir William Petty. " Our business," Wallis tells us, " was (precluding! 
matters of theology and State affairs) to discourse and consider of philo- 
sophical inquiries and such as related thereunto, as Physick, Anr.tomy, 
Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Statics, Magnetics, Ch>Tnicks, 
Mechanicks, and Natural Experiments : with the state of these studies, 
as then cultivated at home and abroad. We then discoursed of the 
circulation of the blood, the valves in the vencB la^tecs, the lymphatic 
vessels, the Copernican hypothesis, the nature of comets and new 
stars, the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in 
the sun and its turning on its own axis, the inequahties and seleno- 
graphy of the moon, the beveral phases of Venus and Mercury, the 
improvement of telescopes, the grinding of glasses for that purpose, 
the weight of air, the possibility or impossibility of vacuities, and 
nature's abhorrence thereof, the Torricellian experiment in quicksilver, 
the descent of heavy bodies and the degree of acceleration therein, 
and divers other things of like nature." 

The other httle company of inquirers, who remained m London, was 
at last broken up by the troubles of the Second Protectorate ; but 
it was revived at the Restoration by the return to London of the more 
eminent members of the Oxford group. Science suddenly became the 
fashion of the day. Charles was himself a fair chemist, and took a 
keen interest in the problems of navigation. The Duke of Buckingham 
varied his freaks of rhyming, drinking, and fiddling, by fits of devotion 
to his laboratory. Poets like Denham and Cowley, courtiers like Sir 
Robert Murray and Sir Kenelm Digby, joined the scientific company 
to which in token of his sympathy with it the King gave the title of 
"The Royal Society." The curious glass toys called Prince Ruperts 
drops recall the scientific inquiries which amused the old age of the 
great cavalry-leader of the Civil War. Wits and fops crowded to the 
meetings of the new Society. Statesmen like Lord Somers felt 
honoured at being chosen its presidents. Its definite establishment 
marks the opening of a great age of scientific discovery m England. 
Almost every year of the half-century which followed saw some step 
made to a wider and truer knowledge. Our first national observatory 
rose at Greenwich, and modern astronomy began with the long series 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



599 



of astronomical observations which immortalized the name of Flamsteed. 
His successor, Halley, undertook the investigation of the tides, of 
comets, and of terrestrial magnetism. Hooke improved the microscope, 
and gave a fresh impulse to microscopical research. Boyle made the 
air-pump a means of advancing the science of pneumatics, and became 
the founder of experimental chemistry. Wilkins pointed forward to 
the science of philology in his scheme of a universal language. 
Sydenham introduced a careful observation of nature and facts which 
changed the whole face of medicine. The physiological researches of 
Willis first threw light upon the structure of the brain. Woodward 
was the founder of mineralogy. In his edition of Willoughby's 
" Ornithology," and in his own " History of Fishes," John Ray was the. 
first to raise zoology to the rank of a science ; and the first scientific 
f classification of animals was attempted in his "Synopsis of Quadrupeds." 
Modern botany began with his "History of Plants," and the researches 
of an Oxford professor, Robert Morrison ; while Grow divided with 
Malpighi the credit of founding the study of vegetable physiology. 
But great as some of these names undoubtedly are, they are lost in 
the lustre of Isaac Newton. Newton was born at Woolsthorpe in 
Lincolnshire, on Christmas-day, in the memorable year which saw the 
outbreak of the Civil War. In the year of the Restoration he entered 
Cambridge, where the teaching of Isaac Barrow quickened his genius 
for mathematics, and where the method of Descartes had superseded 
the older modes of study. From the close of his Cambridge career his 
life became a series of great physical discoveries. At twenty-three 
he facilitated the calculation of planetary movements by his theory of 
Fluxions. The optical discoveries to which he was led by his experi- 
ments with the prism, and which he partly disclosed in the lectures 
which he delivered as Mathematical Professor at Cambridge, were 
embodied in the theory of light which he laid before the Royal Society 
on becoming a Fellow of it. His discovery of the law of gravitation 
had been made as early as 1666 ; but the erroneous estimate which 
was then generally received of the earth's diameter prevented him from 
disclosing it for sixteen years ; and it was not till the eve of the 
Revolution that the "Principia" revealed to the world his new theory 
of the Universe. 

It is impossible to do more than indicate, in such a summary as we 
have given, the wonderful activity of directly scientific thought which 
distinguished the age of the Restoration. But the sceptical and 
experimental temper of mind which this activity disclosed told on 
every phase of the world around it. We see the attempt to bring 
rehgious speculation into harmony with the conclusions of reason 
and experience in the school of Latitudinarian theologians who 
sprang from the group of thinkers which gathered on the eve of 
the Civil War round Lord Falkland at Great Tew. Whatever 



Sec. I. 



1665. 



1671, 



1687. 



6oo 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. I verdict history may pronounce on Falkland's political career, his 
I name must ever remain memorable in the history of religious 
I thought. A new era in English religion began with the speculations 
of the men he gathered round him. Their work was above all to deny 
the authority of tradition in matters of faith, as Bacon had denied it 
in matters of physical research ; and to assert in the one field as in the 
other the supremacy of reason as a test of truth. Of the authority of 
the Church, its Fathers, and its Councils, John Hales, a Canon of 
Windsor, and a friend of Laud, said briefly "it is none." He dis- 
missed with contempt the accepted test of universality. " Universality 
is such a proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed of. The most sin- 
gular and strongest part of human authority is properly in the wisest 
and the most virtuous, and these, I trow, are not the most universal." 
William Chillingworth, a man of larger if not keener mind, had been 
taught by an early conversion to Catholicism, and by a speedy return, 
the insecurity of any basis for belief but that of private judgment. 
In his " Religion of Protestants " he set aside ecclesiastical tradition 
or Church authority as grounds of faith in favour of the Bible, but only 
of the Bible as interpreted by the common reason of men, Jeremy 
Taylor, the most brilliant of English preachers, a sufferer like Chilling- 
worth on the Royalist side during the troubles, and who was rewarded 
at the Restoration with the bishopric of Down, limited even the 
authority of the Scriptures themselves. Reason was the one means . 
which Taylor approved of in interpreting the Bible ; but the certainty 
of the conclusions which reason drew from the Bible varied, as he 
held, with the conditions of reason itself. In all but the simplest 
truths of natural religion " we are not sure not to be deceived." The 
deduction of points of belief from the words of the Scriptures was 
attended with all the uncertainty and liability to error which sprang 
from the infinite variety of human understandings, the difficulties which 
hinder the discovery of truth, and the influences which divert the 
mind from accepting or rightly estimating it. It was plain to a mind 
like Chillingworth's that this denial of authority, this perception of the 
imperfection of reason in the discovery of absolute truth, struck as 
directly at the root of Protestant dogmatism, as at the root of Catholic 
infallibility. " If Protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming 
authority] it is for doing it too much and not too little. This pre- 
sumptuous imposing of the senses of man upon the words of God, of 
the special senses of man upon the general words of God, and laying 
them upon men's consciences together under the equal penalty of death 
and damnation, this vain conceit that we can speak of the things of 
God better than in the words of God, this deifying our own interpre- 
tations and tyrannous enforcing them upon others, this restraining of 
the word of God from that latitude and generality, and the under- 
standings of men from that liberty wherein Christ and His apostles 



IX. 



THE REVOLUTION. 



6oi 



left them^ is and hath been the only foundation of all the schisms of 
the Church, and that which makes them immortal." In his "' Liberty 
of Prophecying" Jeremy Taylor pleaded the cause of toleration with 
a weight of argument which hardly required the triumph of the Inde- 
pendents and the shock of Naseby to drive it home. But the freedom 
of conscience which the Independent founded on the personal com- 
munion of each soul with God, the Latitudinarian founded on the 
weakness of authority and the imperfection of human reason. Taylor 
pleads even for the Anabaptist and the Romanist. He only gives 
place to the action of the civil magistrate in " those religions whose 
principles destroy government/' and "those religions — if there be any 
such — which teach ill life." Hales openly professed that he would 
quit the Church to-morrow if it required him to beheve that all that 
dissented from it must be damned. Chillingworth denounced perse- 
cution in words of fire. " Take away this persecution, burning, 
cm sing, damning of men for not subscribing the words of men as the 
words of God ; require of Christians only to believe Christ and to call 
no man master but Him ; let them leave claiming infallibiHty that 
have no title to it, and let them that in their own words disclaim it, 

disclaim it also in their actions Protestants are inexcusable if 

they do offer violence to other men's consciences." From the denun- 
ciation of intolerance the Latitudinarians passed easily to the dream 
of comprehension which had haunted every nobler soul since the 
" Utopia " of More. Hales based his loyalty to the Church of England 
on the fact that it was the largest and the most tolerant Church in 
Christendom. Chillingworth pointed out how many obstacles to com- 
prehension were removed by such a simplification of belief as flowed 
from a rational theolog}'. Like More, he asked for " such an ordering 
ot the public service of God as that all who believe the Scripture and 
live according to it might without scruple or h}-pocrisy or protestation 
in any part join in it." Taylor, like Chillingworth, rested his hope of 
union on the simplification of belief. He saw a probability of error 
in all the creeds and confessions adopted by Christian Churches. 
'•'Such bodies of confessions and articles," he said, ''must do much 
hurt." ^' He is rather the schismatic who makes unnecessary and 
inconvenient impositions, than he who disobeys them because he can- 
not do otherwise without violating his conscience.''' The Apostles' 
Creed in its literal meaning seemed to him the one term of Christian 
union which the Church had any right to impose. 

With the Restoration the Latitudinarians came at once to the front. 
They were soon distinguished from both Puritans and High Churchmen 
by their opposition to dogma, by their preference of reason to tradition 
whether of the Bible or the Church, by their basing religion on a 
natural theologv^, by their aiming at rightness of life rather than a: 
correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of toleration and compre- 



n 



602 



HISTORY O'F THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



liension as the grounds of Christian unity. ChiUingworth and Taylor 
found successors in the restless good sense of Burnet, the enlightened 
piety of Tillotson, and the calm philosophy of Bishop Butler. Mean- 
while the impulse which such men were giving to religious speculation 
was being given to political and social inquiry by a mind of far greater 
keenness and power. 

Bacon's favourite secretary was Thomas Hobbes. "He was 
beloved by his Lordship," Aubrey tells us, " who was wont to have 
him walk in his delicate groves, where he did meditate ; and when 
a notion darted into his mind, Mr. Hobbes was presently to write 
it down. And his Lordship was wont to say that he did it better 
than anyone else about him ; for that many times when he read their 
notes he scarce understood what they writ, because they imder- 
stood it not clearly themselves." The long life of Hobbes covers 
a memorable space in our history. He was born in the year of the 
victory over the Armada ; he died, at the age of ninety-two, only nine 
years before the Revolution. His ability soon made itself felt, and in 
his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon, and the friend of Ben 
Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But it was not till the age of 
fifty-four, when he withdrew to France on the eve of the Great 
Rebellion, that his speculations were made known to the world in his 
treatise " De Cive." He joined the exiled Court at Paris, and became 
mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love and regard for 
him seems to have been real to the end. But his post was soon 
forfeited by the appearance of his " Leviathan ; " he was forbidden to 
approach the Court, and returned to England, where he seems to have 
acquiesced in the rule of Cromwell. The Restoration brought him 
a pension ; but his two great works were condemned by Parliament, 
and "Hobbisna" became, ere he died, the popular synonym for 
irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded oddly in 
the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things necessary to 
salvation, Faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But the prejudice 
sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist philosophy 
must necessarily have on the current religion and the current notions of ' 
political and social morality. Hobbes was the first great English 
writer who dealt with the science of government from the ground, 
not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of man in 
the stage of human developement which he supposed to precede that of j 
society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted beliefs. 
Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only natural 
relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man himself I 
which created human society out of this chaos of warring strengths. 
Hobbes in fact denied the existence of the more spiritual sides of 
man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human, 
custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demon- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



603 



strations of a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense 
of social utility to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such 
as gratitude or the love of our neighbour, were in fact contrary to 
the natural passions of man, and powerless to restrain them. 
Nor had rehgion rescued man by the interposition of a Divine will. 
Nothing better illustrates the daring with which the new scepti- 
cism was to break through the theological traditions of the older 
world than the pitiless logic with which Hobbes assailed the very 
theory of revelation. " To say God hath spoken to man in a dream, 
is no more than to say man dreamed that God hath spoken to him." 
" To say one hath seen a vision, or heard a voice, is to say he hath 
dreamed between sleeping and waking." Religion, in fact, was nothing 
more than " the fear of invisible powers ; " and here, as in all other 
branches of human science, knowledge dealt with words and not 
with things. It was man himself who for his own profit created 
society, by laying down certain of his natural rights and retaining 
only those of self-preservation. A Covenant between man and man 
originally created " that great Leviathan called the Commonwealth or 
State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and 
strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was 
intended." The fiction of such an " original contract " has long been 
dismissed from political speculation, but its effect at the time of its 
first appearance was immense. Its almost universal acceptance put 
an end to the religious and patriarchal theories of society, on which 
Kingship had till now founded its claim of a Divine right to authority 
which no subject might question. But if Hobbes destroyed the old 
ground of Royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one. To 
create a society at all, he held that the whole body of the governed 
must have resigned all rights save that of self-preservation into the 
hands of a single ruler, who was the representative of all. Such a 
ruler was absolute, for to make terms with him implied a man making 
terms with himself. The transfer of rights was inahenable, and after 
generations were as much bound by it as the generation which made 
the transfer. As the head of the whole body, the ruler judged every 
question, settled the laws of civil justice or injustice, or decided between 
religion and superstition. His was a Divine Right, and the only Divine 
Sight, because in him were absorbed all the rights of each of his sub- 
jects. It was not in any constitutional check that Hobbes looked for 
the prevention of tyranny, but in the common education and enlighten- 
ment as to their real end and the best mode of reaching it on the part 
of both subjects and Prince. And the real end of both was the weal 
of the Commonwealth at large. It was in laying boldly down this end 
of government, as well as in the basis of contract on which he made 
government repose, that Hobbes really influenced all later pohtics. 
Locke, like his master, derived political authority from the consent of 



6o4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



the governed, and adopted the common weal as its end. But in th 
theoiy of Locke the people remain passively in possession of the powel 
which th-v have delegated to the Prince, and have the right to with! 
draw it \i it be used for purposes inconsistent with the end whicli 
society was formed to promote. To the origin of all power in the 
people, and the end of all power for the people's good— the two o-reat 
doctrines of Hobbes— Locke added the right of resistance, the re- 
sponsibiHty of princes to their subjects for a due execution of their 
trust, and the supremacy of legislative assembhes as the voice of the 
people itself. It was in this modified and enlarged form that the new 
political philosophy revealed itself in the Revolution of 1688. 



Section II.— The Restoration. 1660— 1667. 



ii 



\Authorities. — Clarendon's own account of his ministry in his ** Life/' 
Bishop Kennet's ** Register," and Burnet's lively ** History of my own Times," 
are our principal sources of information. The life of James the Second given 
in Macpherson's '* Original Papers" is of high value for this and the next 
period, but must be used with caution. For the relations of the Church and 
the Dissenters, see Neal's '* History of the Puritans," Calamy's " Memoirs of 
the Ejected Ministers," Mr. Dixon's *'Life of WilHam Penn," Baxter's *'Auto- 
biography," and Bunyan's account of his sufferings in his various works. The 
social history of the time is admirably given by Pepys in his *' Memoirs." 
Throughout the whole reign of Charles the Second, the " Constitutional 
Plistory " of Mr. Hallam is judicious and full in its information.] 



<l 



It is only by a survey of the larger tendencies of English thought 
that we can understand the course of English history in the years 
which followed the Restoration. When Charles the Second entered 
Whitehall, the work of the Long Parliament seemed undone. Not 
only was the Monarchy restored, but it was restored without restriction 
or condition ; and of the two great influences which had hitherto 
served as checks on its power, the first, that of Puritanism, had 
become hateful to the nation at large, while the second, the tradition 
of constitutional liberty, was discredited by the issue of the Civil War. 
But amidst all the tumult of demonstrative loyalty the great " revolu- 
tion of the seventeenth century," as it has justly been styled, went 
steadily on. The supreme power was gradually transferred from the 
Crown to the House of Commons. Step by step, Parliament drew 
nearer to a solution of the political problem which had so long foiled 
its efforts, the problem how to make its will the law of administrative 
action without itself undertaking the task of administration. It is 
only by carefully fixing our eyes on this transfer of power, and by 
noting the successive steps towards its realization, tliat we can under- 
stand the complex history of the Restoration and the Revolution. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



6o\ 



The first acts of the new Government showed a sense that, loyal as , 
was the temper of the nation, its loyalty was by no means the blind j 
devotion of the Cavalier. The chief part in the Restoration had in j 
fact been played by the Presbyterians ; and the Presbyterians were j 
still powerful from their exclusive possession of the magistracy and all 
local authority. The first ministry, therefore, which Charles ventured 
to form, bore on it the marks of a compromise. Its most influential 
member was Sir Edward Hyde, the adviser of the King during his 
exile, who now became Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor. Lord 
Southampton, a steady Royalist, accepted the post of Lord Treasurer ; 
and the devotion of Ormond was rewarded with a dukedom and the 
dignity of Lord Steward. But the Presbyterian interest was even more 
powerfully represented. Monk remained Lord-General with the title 
of Duke of Albemarle. The King's brother, James, Duke of York, 
was made Lord Admiral ; but the administration of the fleet was 
virtually in the hands of one of Cromwell's followers, Montagu, the 
new Earl of Sandwich. Lord Saye and Sele was made Lord Privy 
Seal. Sir Ashley Cooper was soon rewarded for his services by a barony 
and the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Of the two Secretaries 
of State, the one, Nicholas, was a devoted Royalist ; the other, Morice, 
was a steady Presbyterian. Of the thirty members of the Privy 
Council, twelve had borne arms against the King. It was clear that 
such a ministry was hardly likely to lend itself to a mere policy of 
reaction ; and even its most Royalist members, Clarendon and South- 
ampton, were Royalists of a constitutional type. 

The policy of the new Government, therefore, fell fairl\- in with the 
temper of the Convention, which, after declaring itself a Parliament, 
proceeded to consider the measures which were requisite for a settle- 
ment of the nation. The Convention had been chosen under the 
ordinances Avhich excluded Royalist " Malignants " from the right of 
voting ; and the bulk of its members were men of Presbyterian 
sympathies, loyalist to the core, but as averse to despotism as the 
Long Parliament itself. In its earlier days a member who asserted 
that those who had fought against the King were as guilty as those who 
cut off his head was sternly rebuked from the Chair. The first 
measure which was undertaken by the House, the Bill of Indemnity 
and Oblivion for all offences committed during the recent troubles, 
showed at once the moderate character of the Commons. In the punish- 
ment of the Regicides indeed, a Presbyterian might well be as zealous 
as a Cavalier. In spite of a Proclamation he had issued in the first 
days of his return, in which mercy was virtually promised to all the 
judges of the late King who surrendered themselves to justice, Charles 
pressed for revenge on those whom he regarded as his father's murderers^ 
and the Lords went hotly with the King. It is to the credit of the ■ 
Commons that they steadily resisted the cry for blood. By the original 



Sec. II. 



The 
Restora- 



6o6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



provisions of the Bill of Oblivion and Indemnity only seven of the living 
Regicides were excluded from pardon ; and though the rise of Royalist 
fervour during the three months in which the bill was under discussion 
forced the House in the end to leave almost all to the course of justice, 
the requirement of a special Act of Parliament for the execution of 
those who had surrendered under the Proclamation protected the lives 
of most of them. Twenty-eight of the King's Judges were in the end 
arraigned at the bar, but only thirteen were executed, and only one 
of these. General Harrison, had played any conspicuous part in the 
rebellion. Twenty others, who had been prominent in what were now 
called " the troubles " of the past twenty years were declared incapable 
of holding office under the State : and by an unjustifiable clause which 
was introduced into the Act before its final adoption. Sir Harry Vane 
and General Lambert, though they had taken no part in the King's 
death, were specially exempted from the general pardon. In dealing 
with the questions of property which arose from the confiscations and 
transfers of estates during the Civil Wars the Convention met yet 
greater difficulties. No opposition was made to the resumption of 
all Crown-lands by the State, but the Convention desired to protect the 
rights of those who had purchased Church property, and of those who 
were in actual possession of private estates which had been confiscated 
by the Long Parliament, and by the government which succeeded it. The 
bills however which they prepared for this purpose were delayed by the 
artifices of Hyde ; and at the close of the session the bishops and the 
evicted Royalists quietly re-entered into the occupation of their old 
possessions. The Royalists indeed were far from being satisfied with 
this summary confiscation. Fines and sequestrations had impoverished 
all the steady adherents of the Royal cause, and had driven many of 
them to forced sales of their estates ; and a demand was made for 
compensation for their losses and the cancelling of such sales. With- 
out such provisions, said the frenzied Cavaliers, the bill would be 
"a Bill of Indemnity for the King's enemies, and of Oblivion for 
his friends." But here the Convention stood firm. All transfers of 
property by sale were recognized as valid, and all claims of compensa- 
tion for losses by sequestration were barred by the Act. From the 
settlement of the nation the Convention passed to the settlement of 
the relations between the nation and the Crown. So far was the 
constitutional work of the Long Parliament from being undone, that 
its more important measures were silently accepted as the base of 
future government. Not a voice demanded the restoration of the Star 
Chamber, or of monopolies, or of the Court of High Commission ; no one 
disputed the justice of the condemnation of Ship-money, or the assertion 
of the sole right of Parliament to grant supplies to the Crown. The 
Militia, indeed, was placed in the King's hands ; but the army was 
disbanded, though Charles was permitted to keep a few regiments for 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



607 



his guard. The revenue was fixed at ;^ 1,200,000 ; and this sum was 
granted to the King for life, a grant which might have been perilous for 
freedom had not the taxes provided to supply the sum fallen constantly 
below this estimate, while the current expenses of the Crown, even in 
time of peace, greatly exceeded it. But even for this grant a heavy 
price was exacted. Though the rights of the Crown over lands held, 
as the bulk of English estates were held, in mihtary tenure, had ceased 
to be of any great pecuniary value, they were indirectly a source of 
considerable power. The right of wardship and of marriage, above all, 
enabled the sovereign to exercise a galling pressure on every landed 
proprietor in his social and domestic concerns. Under Elizabeth, the 
right of wardship had been used to secure the education of all Catholic 
minors in the Protestant faith ; and under James and his successor 
minors and heiresses had been granted to Court favourites or sold in 
open market to the highest bidder. But the real value of these rights 
to the Crown lay in the political pressure which it was able to exert 
through them on the country gentry. A squire was naturally eager to 
buy the good will of a sovereign who might soon be the guardian of his 
daughter and the administrator of his estate. But the same motives 
which made the Crown cling to this prerogative made the Parlia- 
ment anxious to do away with it. Its efforts to bring thi'; about under 
James the First had been foiled by the King^s stubborn resistance ; but 
the long interruption of these rights during the wars made their revival 
almost impossible at the Restoration, and one of the first acts there- 
fore of the Convention was to free the country gentr}^ by abolishing the 
claims of the Crown to rehefs and wardship, purveyance, and pre-emp- 
tion, and by the conversion of lands held till then in chivalry into 
lands held in common socage. In lieu of his rights, Charles accepted 
a grant of ;!^ 100,000 a year ; a sum which it was originally purposed to 
raise by a tax on the lands thus exempted from feudal exactions ; but 
which was provided for in the end, with less justice, by a general excise. 
Successful as the Convention had been in effecting the settlement of 
political matters, it failed in bringing about a settlement of the 
Church. In his proclamation from Breda, Charles had promised to 
respect liberty of conscience, and to assent to any Acts of Parliament 
which should be presented to him for its security. The Convention 
was in the main Presbyterian ; but it soon became plain that the 
continuance of a purely Presbyterian system was impossible. " The 
generality of the people," wrote a shrewd Scotch observer from 
London, "are doting after Prelacy and the Service-book." The 
Convention, however, still hoped for some modified form of Episco- 
pahan government which would enable the bulk of the Puritan party 
to remain within the Church. A large part of the existing clergy, 
indeed, were Independents, and for these no compromise with Episco- 
pacy was possible : but the greater number were moderate Presby- 



6o8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



terians, who were ready " for fear of worse " to submit to such a plan 
of Church government as Archbishop Usher had proposed, a plan in 
which the bishop was only the president of a diocesan board of 
presbyters, and to accept the Liturgy with a few amendments and the 
omission of the " superstitious practices." It was to a compromise of 
this kind that the King himself leant at the beginning, and a Royal 
proclamation declared his approval of the Puritan demands ; but a 
bill introduced by Sir Matthew Hale to turn this proclamation into 
law was foiled by the opposition of Hyde, and by the promise of a 
Conference. The ejected Episcopalian clergy who still remained alive 
entered again into their livings ; the bishops returned to their sees ; 
and the dissolution of the Convention-Parliament destroyed the last 
hope of an ecclesiastical compromise. The tide of loyalty had, in fact, 
been rising fast during its session, and the influence of this was seen 
in one of the latest resolutions of the Convention itself. The bodies 
of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were torn by its order from their 
graves and hung on gibbets at Tyburn, while those of Pym and Blake 
were cast out of Westminster Abbey into St. Margaret's churchyard. 
But in the elections for the new Parliament the zeal for Church and 
King swept all hope of moderation and compromise before it. The 
new members were for the most part young men, and " the most pro- 
fane, swearing fellows," wrote a Puritan, Roger Pepys, "that ever I heard 
in my life." The Presbyterians sank to a handful of fifty members. 
The loyalty of the Parliament far outran that of Clarendon himself. 
Though it confirmed the acts of the Convention, it could with diflicultv 
be brought to assent to the Act of Indemnity. The Commons pressed 
for the prosecution of Vane. Vane was protected alike by the spirit 
of the law and by the King's pledge to the Convention that, even if 
convicted of treason, he would not suffer him to be brought to the. 
block. But he was now brought to trial on the charge of treasoJ] 
against a King ^^kept out of his Royal authority by traitors and rebels,'^ ' 
and his spirited defence served as an excuse for his execution. " He 
is too dangerous a man to let live," Charles wrote with characteristic 
coolness, " if we can safely put him out of the way." But the new j 
members were yet better Churchmen than loyahsts. A common 
suffering had thrown the gentry and the Episcopalian clergy together,- 
and for the first time in our history the country squires were zealous 
for the Church. At the opening of their session they ordered every 
member to receive the communion, and the League and Covenant to 
be solemnly burnt by the common hangman in Westminster Hall. 
The bishops were restored to their seats in the House of Lords. The 
conference at the Savoy between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians 
broke up in anger, and the few alterations made in the Liturgy were 
made with a view to disgust rather than to conciliate the Puritan 
party. The strongholds of this party were the corporations of the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



609 



boroughs ; and an attempt was made to drive them from these by the 
Test and Corporation Act, which required a reception of the com- 
munion according to the rites of the Anghcan Church, a renunciation 
of the League and Covenant, and a declaration that it was unlawful 
on any grounds to take up arms against the King, before admission to 
municipal offices. A more deadly blow was dealt at the Puritans in 
the renewal of the Act of Uniformity. Not only was the use of the 
Prayer-book, and the Prayer-book only, enforced in all public worship, 
but an unfeigned consent and assent was demanded from every minister 
of the Church to all which was contained in it ; while, for the first time 
since the Reformation, all orders save those conferred by the hands of 
bishops were legally disallowed. It was in vain that Ashley opposed 
the bill fiercely in the Lords, and that even Clarendon, who felt that the 
King's word was at stake, pressed for the insertion of clauses enabling 1 
the Crown to grant dispensations from its provisions. Charles, whose ' 
aim was to procure a toleration for the Catholics by allowing the 
Presbyterians to feel the pressure of persecution, assented to the bill 
while he promised to suspend its execution by the exercise of his 
prerogative. 

The bishops however were resolute to enforce the law ; and on St. 
Bartholomew's day, the last day allowed for compliance with its re- 
quirements, nearly two thousand rectors and vicars, or about a fifth of 
the English clergy, were driven from their parishes as Nonconformists. 
No such sweeping change in the religious aspect of the Church had 
ever been seen before. The changes of the Reformation had been 
brought about with little change in the clergy itself. Even the seve- 
rities of the High Commission under Elizabeth ended in the ex- 
i pulsion of a few hundreds. If Laud had gone zealously to work in 
emptying Puritan pulpits, his zeal had been to a great extent foiled 
I by the restrictions of the law and by the growth of Puritan sentiment 
I in the clergy as a whole. A far wider change had been brought 
j about by the Civil War ; but the change had been gradual, and had 
. been wrought for the most part on political or moral rather than 
I on religious grounds. The parsons expelled were expelled as royalists 
I or as unfitted for their office by idleness or vice or inability to 
I preach. The change wrought by St. Bartholomew's day was a dis- 
' tinctly religious change, and it was a change which in its sudden- 
ness and completeness stood utterly alone. The rectors and vicars 
who were driven out were the most learned and the most active of 
their order. The bulk of the great livings throughout the country 
j were in their hands. They stood at the head of the London clergy, 
j as the London clergy stood in general repute at the head of their 
class throughout England. They occupied the higher posts at the 
, two Universities. No English divine, save Jeremy Taylor, rivalled 
1 Howe as a preacher. No parson was so renowned a controver- 

fe^- . R R 



6io 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



rCHAP. 



sialist, or so indefatigable a parish priest, as Baxter. And behind 
these men stood a fifth of the whole body of the clergy, men whose 
zeal and labour had diffused throughout the country a greater appear- 
ance of piety and religion than it had ever displayed before. But the 
expulsion of these men was far more to the Church of England than 
the loss of their individual services. It was the definite expulsion oi 
a great party which from the time of the Reformation had played the 
most active and popular part in the life of the Church. It was the 
close of an effort which had been going on ever since Elizabeth^s 
accession to bring the English Communion into closer relations with 
the Reformed Communions of the Continent, and into greater harmony 
with the religious instincts of the nation at large. The Church of 
England stood from that moment isolated and alone among all the 
churches of the Christian world. The Reformation had severed it 
irretrievably from those which still clung to the obedience of the 
Papacy. By its rejection of all but episcopal orders, the Act of Uni- 
formity severed it as irretrievably from the general body of the 
Protestant Churches, whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while 
thus cut off from all healthy rehgious communion with the world 
without, it sank into immobility within. With the expulsion of the 
Puritan clergy, all change, all efforts after reform, all national develop- 
ment, suddenly stopped. From that time to this the Episcopal Church 
has been unable to meet the varying spiritual needs of its adherents 
by any modification of its government or its worship. It stands alone 
among all the religious bodies of Western Christendom in its failure 
through two hundred years to devise a single new service of prayer or 
of praise. But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's day have been 
harmful to the spiritual life of the English Church, they have been in 
the highest degree advantageous to the cause of religious liberty. 
At the Restoration religious freedom seemed again to have been lost. 
Only the Independents and a few despised sects, such as the Quakers, 
upheld the right of every man to worship God according to the 
bidding of his own conscience. The great bulk of the Puritan party, 
with the Presbyterians at its head, were at one with their opponents 
in desiring a uniformity of worship, if not of belief, throughout the 
land ; and, had the two great parties within the Church held together, 
their weight would have been almost irresistible. Fortunately the great 
severance of St. Bartholomew's day drove out the Presbyterians from 
the Church to which they clung, and forced them into a general union 
with sects which they had hated till then almost as bitterly as the 
bishops themselves. A common persecution soon blended the Non- 
conformists into one. Persecution broke down before the numbers, 
the wealth, and the political weight of the new sectarians ; and the 
Church, for the first time in its history, found itself confronted with 
I an organized body of Dissenters without its pale. The impossibility 



TX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



6n 



of crushing such a body as this wrested from Enghsh statesmen 
the first legal recognition of freedom of worship in the Toleration 
Act ; their rapid growth in later times has by degrees stripped the 
Church of almost all the exclusive privileges which it enjoyed as a 
religious body, and now threatens what remains of its official con 
nection with the State. With these remoter consequences however we 
are not as yet concerned. It is enough to note here that with the Act 
of Uniformity and the expulsion of the Puritan clergy a new element 
in our rehgious and political history, the element of Dissent, the 
influence of the Nonconformist churches, comes first into play. 

The immediate effect of their expulsion on the Puritans was to 
beget a feeling of despair. Many were for retiring to Holland, 
others proposed flight to New England and the American colonies. 
Charles however was anxious to make use of them in carrying out 
I his schemes for a toleration of the Catholics; and fresh hopes of 
protection were raised by a Royal proclamation, which expressed the 
King's wish to exempt from the penalties of the Act ^^ those who, living 
peaceably, do not conform themselves thereunto, through scruple and 
tenderness of misguided conscience, but modestly and without scandal 
perform their devotions in their own way." Charles promised to bring 
a measure to this effect before Parhament in its coming session. The 
bill which was thus introduced would have enabled the King to 
dispense, not only with the provisions of the Act of Uniformity, but 
with all laws and statutes enforcing conformity in worship, or imposing 
religious tests. Its aim was so obvious, and its unconstitutional 
character so clear, that even the Nonconformists withdrew from sup- 
porting it ; and Ashley alone among the Puritan leaders undertook its 
defence. The threatening attitude of the Commons soon forced the 
King to withdraw it ; but the temper of the Church was now roused, 
, and the hatred of the Nonconformists was embittered by suspicions 
I of the King's secret designs. The Houses extorted from Charles a 
proclamation for the banishment of Roman Catholic priests ; and by 
their Conventicle Act of the following year, they punished by fine, 
imprisonment, and transportation, all meetings of more than five per- 
sons for any religious worship but that of the Common Prayer. The 
Five Mile Act, a year later, completed the code of persecution. By its 
provisions, every clergyman who had been driven out by the Act of 
Uniformity was called on to swear that he held it unlawful under any 
pretext to take up arms against the King, and that he would at no 
time " endeavour any alteration of government in Church or State." 
1 In case of refusal, he was forbidden to go within five miles of any 
t borough, or of any place where he had been wont to minister. As the 
main body of the Nonconformists belonged to the city and trading 
classes, the effect of this measure was to rob them of any religious 
, teaching at all But the tide of religious intolerance was now slowly 
' R R 2 



Sec. II. 



6l2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



ebbing, and a motion to impose the oath of the Five Mile Act on 
every person in the nation was rejected in the same session by a 
majority of six. The sufferings of the Nonconformists indeed could 
hardly fail to tell on the sympathies of the people. The thirst for 
revenge, which had been roused by the tyranny of the Presbyterians 
in their hour of triumph, was satisfied by their humiliation in the hour 
of defeat The sight of pious and learned clergymen driven from 
their homes and their flocks, of religious meetings broken up by the 
constables, of preachers set side by side with thieves and outcasts in 
the dock, of gaols crammed with honest enthusiasts whose piety was 
their only crime, pleaded more eloquently for toleration than all the 
reasoning in the world. We have a clue to the extent of the persecu- 
tion from what we know to have been its effect on a single sect. The 
Quakers had excited alarm by their extravagances of manner, their 
refusal to bear arms or to take oaths ; and a special Act was passed 
for their repression. They were one of the smallest of the Noncon- 
formist bodies, but more than four thousand were soon in prison, and 
of these five hundred were imprisoned in London alone. Large as it 
was, the number rapidly increased : and the King's Declaration of 
Indulgence, twelve years later, set free twelve thousand Quakers who had 
found their way to the gaols. Of the sufferings of the expelled clergy 
one of their own number, Richard Baxter, has given us an account. 
'^ Many hundreds of these, with their wives and children, had neither 
house nor bread. . . . Their congregations had enough to do, besides 
a small maintenance, to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them 
there. Though they were as frugal as possible they could hardly live ; 
some lived on little more than brown bread and water, many had but 
eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so that a piece of 
flesh has not come to one of their tables in six weeks' time ; their 
allowance could scarce afford them bread and cheese. One went to 
plow six days and preached on the Lord's Day. Another was forced 
to cut tobacco for a livelihood." But poverty was the least of their 
sufferings. They were jeered at by the players. They were hooted 
through the streets by the mob. "Many of the ministers, being 
afraid to lay down their ministry after they had been ordained to it, 
preached to such as would hear them in fields and private houses, till 
they were apprehended and cast into gaols, where many of them 
perished." They were excommunicated in the Bishops' Court, or 
fined for non-attendance at church ; and a crowd of informers grew 
up who made a trade of detecting the meetings they held at midnight. 
Aljeyn, the author of the well-known " Alarm to the Unconverted," died 
at ^irty-six from the sufferings he endured in Taunton Gaol. Vavasour 
P9,weil,^ the apostle of Wales, spent the eleven years which followed 
the Re9^r,ation in prisons at Shrewsbury, Southsea, and Cardiff, till 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



613 



he perished in the Fleet. John Bunyan was for twelve years a prisoner 
at Bedford. 

We have already seen the atmosphere of excited feeling in which 
the youth of Bunyan had been spent. From his childhood he heard 
heavenly voices, and saw visions of heaven; from his childhood, 
too, he had been wrestling with an overpowering sense of sin, which 
sickness and repeated escapes from death did much as he grew up to 
deepen. But in spite of his self-reproaches his life was a religious 
one ; and the purity and sobriety of his youth was shown by his 
admission at seventeen into the ranks of the "New Model." Two 
years later the war was over, and Bunyan found himself married 
before he was twenty to a " godly " wife, as young and as poor as 
himself. So poor were the young couple that they could hardly muster 
a spoon and a plate between them ; and the poverty of their home 
deepened, perhaps, the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and 
religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, 
teaching him again to read and write, for he had forgotten his school- 
learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books which 
formed his library. But the darkness only gathered the thicker 
round his imagirxative soul. " I walked," he tells us of this time, " to 
a neighbouring town ; and sate down upon a settle in the street, and 
fell into a very deep pause about the most fearful state my sin had 
brought me to ; and after long musing I lifted up my head ; but 
methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge 
to give me light ; and as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon 
the houses did band themselves against me. Methought that they 
all combined together to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred 
of them, and wept to dwell among them, because I had sinned against 
the Saviour. Oh, how happy now was eveiy creature over I ! for they 
stood fast and kept their station. But I was gone and lost." At last, 
after more than two years of this struggle, the darkness broke. 
Bunyan felt himself " converted," and freed from the burthen of his 
sin. He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few years later 
he became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal post of 
minister in the congregation, his preaching even under the Protecto- 
rate was illegal and " gave great offence," he tells us, " to the doctors 
and priests of that county," but he persisted with little real molestation 
until the Restoration. Six months after the King's return he was 
committed to Bedford Gaol on a charge of preaching in unlicensed 
conventicles ; and his refusal to promise to abstain from preaching 
kept him there eleven years. The gaol was crowded with prisoners 
like himself, and amongst them he continued his ministry, supporting 
himself by making tagged thread laces, and finding some comfort in 
the Bible, the " Book of Martyrs," and the writing materials which 
he was suffered to have with him in his prison. But he was in the 



6i4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



prime of life ; his age was thirty-two when he was imprisoned ; and 

the inactivity and severance from his wife and Httle children was 

hard to bear. "The parting with my wife and poor children," he 

says in words of simple pathos, " hath often been to me in this place 

as the pulling of the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I 

am somewhat too fond of those great mercies, but also because I 

should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, 

and wants that my poor family was like to meet with should I be 

taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to 

my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I 

thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to - 

pieces. * Poor child,' thought I, ^ what sorrow art thou like to have for 

thy portion in this world ! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer 

hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot 

now endure the wind should blow upon thee.' " But suffering could 

not break his purpose, and Bunyan found compensation for the narrow 

bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of his pen. Tracts, 

controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his " Grace Abounding," 

and his " Holy City," followed each other in quick succession. It was 

in his gaol that he wrote the first and greatest part of his " Pilgrim's 

Progress." In no book do we see more clearly the new imaginative 

force which had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their 

study of the Bible. Its English is the simplest and the homeliest 

English which has ever been used by any great English writer ; but 

it is the Enghsh of the Bible. The images of the "Pilgrim's Progress" 

are the images of prophet and evangelist ; it borrows for its tenderer 

outbursts the very verse of the Song of Songs, and pictures the 

Heavenly City in the words of the Apocalypse. But so completely 

has the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the 

natural expression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its 

words have become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices 

of heaven till all sense of possible unreahty has died away. He tells 

his tale with such a perfect naturalness that allegories become living 

things, that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle are as real 

to us as places we see every day, that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. 

Worldly Wiseman as if we had met them in the street. It is in this 

amazing reality of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative genius 

specially displays itself. But this is far from being his only excellence. 

In its range, in its directness, in its simple grace, in the ease with 

which it changes from lively dialogue to dramatic action, from simple 

pathos to passionate earnestness, in the subtle and delicate fancy 

which often suffuses its childlike words, in its playful humour, its bold 

character-painting, in the even and balanced power which passes 

without effort from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the land 

" where the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was on the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



615 



borders of heaven," in its sunny kindliness, unbroken by one bitter 
word, the '^Pilgrim's Progress" is among the noblest of English poems. 
JFor if Puritanism had first discovered the poetry which contact with 
\ the spiritual world awakes in the meanest souls, Bunyan was the first 
I of the Puritans who revealed this poetry to the outer world. The jour- 
ney of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly City is 
simply a record of the life of such a Puritan as Bunyan himself, seen 
through an imaginative haze of spiritual idealism in which its com- 
monest incidents are heightened and glorified. He is himself the 
Pilgrim who flies from the City of Destruction, who cHmbs the hill 
Difficulty, who faces Apollyon, who sees his loved ones cross the river 
of Death towards the Heavenly City, and how, because " the hill on 
which the City was framed was higher than the clouds, they therefore 
went up through the region of the air, sweetly talking as they went." 
r The popularity which the "Pilgrim's Progress" enjoyed from the first 
I proves that the rehgious sympathies of the English people were still 
'mainly Puritan. Before Bunyan's death in 1688 ten editions of the 
book had already been sold, and though even Cowper hardly dared to 
quote it for fear of moving a sneer in the polite world of his day, its 
/avour among the middle classes and the poor has grown steadily from 
(its author's day to our own. It is probably the most popular and the 
most widely known of all English books. But the inner current of the 
national fife had httle relation to the outer history of the Restoration. 
While Bunyan was lying in Bedford Gaol, and the Church was carry- 
ing on its bitter persecution of the Nonconfonnists, England was 
planging into a series of humiliations and losses without example in 
her history. The fatal strife with Holland which had been closed by 
the wisdom of Cromwell was renewed. The quarrel of the Dutch 
and English merchants on the Guinea coast, where both sought a 
monopoly of the trade in gold dust and slaves, was fanned by the 
ambition of the Duke of York and by the resentment of Charles him- 
self at the insults he had suffered from Holland in his exile into a war. 
An obstinate battle off Lowestoft ended in a victory for the English 
fleet ; but in a subsequent encounter with De Ruyter off the North 
Foreland Monk and his fleet were only saved from destruction by the 
arrival of a reinforcement under Prince Rupert. " They may be killed," 
said De Witt, " but they cannot be conquered ; " and the saying was as 
true of one side as of the other. A third battle, as hard-fought as its 
predecessors, ended in the triumph of the English, and their fleet sailed 
along the coast of Holland, burning ships and towns. But the thought 
of triumph was soon forgotten in the terrible calamities which fell on 
the capital. In six months a hundred thousand Londoners died of the 
Plague which broke out in its crowded streets ; and the Plague was 
followed by a fire, which beginning near Fish Street reduced the whole 
city to ashes from the Tower to the Temple. Thirteen hundred houses 



Sec II. 



6i6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



and ninety churches were destroyed. The loss of merchandise and 
property was beyond coimt. The Treasury was empty, and neither 
ships nor forts were manned, when the Dutch fleet appeared in the 
Nore, advanced unopposed up the Thames to Gravesend, forced the 
boom which protected the Medway, burnt three men-of-war which lay 
anchored in the river, and for six weeks sailed proudly along the 
southern coast, the masters of the Channel. 

Section III.— Charles the Second. 1667—1673. 

\Autho7ities. — To Burnet, Kennett, and the other authorities mentioned for 
the preceding period, we may add the Memoirs of Sir William Temple, with 
Lord Macaulay's well-known Essay on that statesman, Reresby's Memoirs, 
and the works of. Andrew Marvell. The '* Memoirs of the Count de Gram- 
mont," by Anthony Hamilton, give a witty and amusing picture of the life of 
the Count and of Charles himself Lingard becomes of high importance 
during this and the following period from the original materials he has used, and 
from his clear and dispassionate statement of the Catholic side of the question. 
See too for this the account of James himself in Macpherson's ** State Papers." 
Dalrymple, in his ** Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland," was the first to 
discover the real secret of the negotiations with France ; but all pievious 
researches have been superseded by those of M. Mignet, whose " Negociations 
relatives a la succession d'Espagne" (Paris, 1835) 1^ indispensable for a real 
knowledge of this and the following period. ] 



The thunder of the Dutch guns in the Medway and the Thames 
woke England to a bitter sense of its degradation. The dream of 
loyalty was over. "Everybody no w-a-days/' Pepys tells us, "reflect 
upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made 
all the neighbour princes fear him." But diverts successor was coolly 
watching this shame and discontent of his people with the one aim of 
turning it to his own advantage. To Charles the Second the degrada- 
tion of England was only a move in the political game which he was 
playing, a game played with so consummate a secrecy and skill that it 
deceived not only the closest observers of his own day but still mis- 
leads historians of ours. What his subjects saw in their King was a 
pleasant, brown-faced gentleman playing with his spaniels, or drawing 
caricatures of his ministers, or flinging cakes to the water-fowl in the 
park. To all outer seeming Charles v/as the most consummate of idlers. 
" He delighted," says one of his courtiers, " in a bewitching kind of 
pleasure called sauntering." The business-like Pepys soon discovered 
that " the King do mind nothing but pleasures, and hates the very 
sight or thoughts of business." He only laughed when Tom Killigrew 
frankly told him that badly as things were going there was one man 
whose employment would soon set them right, " and this is one Charles 
Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, 
and hath no other employment." That Charles had great natural 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



617 



parts no one doubted. In his earlier days of defeat and danger he 
showed a cool courage and presence of mind which never failed him in 
the many perilous moments of his reign. His temper was pleasant 
and social, his manners perfect, and there was a careless freedom and 
courtesy in his a.ddress which won over everybody who came into his 
presence. His education indeed had been so grossly neglected that he 
could hardly read a plain Latin book ; but his natural quickness and 
intelligence showed itself in his pursuit of chemistry and anatomy, 
and in the interest he showed in the scientific inquiries of the Royal 
Society. Like Peter the Great, his favourite study was that of naval 
architecture, and he piqued himself on being a clever ship-builder. He 
had some little love too for art and poetry, and a taste for music. 
But his shrewdness and vivacity showed itself most in his endless talk. 
He was fond of telling stories, and he told them with a good deal of 
grace and humour. His humour indeed never forsook him : even on 
his death-bed he turned to the weeping courtiers around and whispered 
an apology for having been so unconscionable a time in dying. He 
held his own fairly with the wits of his Court, and bandied repartees on 
equal terms with Sedley or Buckingham. Even Rochester in his 
merciless epigram was forced to own that " Charles never said a foolish 
thing." He had inherited in fact his grandfather's gift of pithy sayings, 
and his cynical irony often gave an amusing turn to them. When his 
brother, the most unpopular man in England, solemnly warned him of 
plots against his life, Charles laughingly bid him set all fear aside. 
" They will never kill me, James," he said, "to make you king.'' But 
courage and wit and ability seemed to have been bestowed on him in vain. 
Charles hated business. He gave no sign of ambition. The one thing 
he seemed in earnest about was sensual pleasure, and he took his plea- 
sure with a cynical shamelessness which roused the disgust even of his 
shameless courtiers. Mistress followed mistress, and the guilt of a troop 
of profligate women was blazoned to the world by the gift of titles and 
estates. The Royal bastards were set amongst English nobles. The 
Ducal house of Grafton springs from the King's adultery with Barbara 
Palmer, whom he created Duchess of Cleveland. The Dukes of St. Albans 
owe their origin to his intrigue with Nell Gwynn, a player and a cour- 
tezan. Louise de Querouaille, a mistress sent by France to win him to 
its interests, became Duchess of Portsmouth, and ancestress of the 
house of Richmond. An earlier mistress, Lucy Walters, had made him 
father in younger days of the boy whom he raised to the Dukedom of 
Monmouth, and to whom the Dukes of Buccleugh trace their line. 
But Charles was far from being content with these recognized mistresses, 
or with a single form of self-indulgence. Gambling and drinking 
helped to fill up the vacant moments when he could no longer toy 
with his favourites or bet at Newmarket. No thought of remorse or of 
shame seems ever to have crossed his mind. "He could not think, 



6i8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



God would make a man miserable/' he said once, " only for taking 
a little pleasure out of the way." From shame indeed he was shielded 
by his cynical disbelief in human virtue. Virtue he regarded simply 
as a trick by which clever hypocrites imposed upon fools. Honour 
among men seemed to him as mere a pretence as chastity among 
women. Gratitude he had none, for he looked upon self-interest as 
the only motive of men's actions, and though soldiers had died and 
women had risked their lives for him, he "loved others as little as he 
thought they loved him." But if he felt no gratitude for benefits he 
felt no resentment for wrongs. He was incapable either of love or of 
hate. The only feeling he retained for his fellow-men was that of an 
amused contempt. 

It was difficult for Englishmen to beheve that any real danger to 
liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as Charles 
the Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the 
King's strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism 
of the Stuarts who had gone before him. His shrewdness laughed 
his grandfather's theories of Divine Right down the wind. His 
indolence made such a personal administration as that which his father 
delighted in burthensome to him : he was too humorous a man to 
care for the pomp and show of power, and too good-natured a man to 
play the tyrant. " He told Lord Essex," Burnet says, " that he did 
not wish to be like a Grand Signior, with some mutes about him, and 
bags of bowstrings to strangle men ; but he did not think he was a 
king so long as a company of fellows were looking into his actions, 
and examining his ministers as well as his accounts." " A king," he 
thought, " who might be checked, and have his ministers called to an 
account, was but a king in name." In other words, he had no settled 
plan of tyranny, but he meant to rule as independently as he could, 
and from the beginning to the end of his reign there never was a 
moment when he was not doing something to carry out his aim. But 
he carried it out in a tentative, irregular fashion which it was as hard to 
detect as to meet. Whenever there was any strong opposition he gave 
way. If popular feeling demanded the dismissal of his ministers, he 
dismissed them. If it protested against his declaration of Indul- 
gence, he recalled it. If it cried for victims in the frenzy of the 
Popish Plot, he gave it victims till the frenzy was at an end. It was easy 
for Charles to yield and to wait, and just as easy for him to take up 
the thread of his purpose again the moment the pressure was oven 
The one fixed resolve which overrode every other thought in the King's 
mind was a resolve " not to set out on his travels again." His father 
had fallen through a quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was 
determined to remain on good terms with the Parliament till he was 
strong enough to pick a quarrel to his profit. He treated the Lords 
with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its seriousness. 



IX. 



THE REVOLUTION. 



619 



" Their debates amused him," he said in his indolent way ; and he stood 
chatting before the fire while peer after peer poured invectives on his 
ministers, and laughed louder than the rest when Shaftesbury directed 
his coarsest taunts at the barrenness of the Queen. Courtiers were 
entrusted with the secret '' management " of the Commons : obstinate 
country gentlemen were brought to the Royal closet to kiss the King^s 
hand and listen to the King's pleasant stories of his escape after 
Worcester ; and yet more obstinate country gentlemen were bribed. 
Where bribes, flattery, and management failed, Charles was content 
to yield and to wait till his time came again. Meanwhile he went on 
patiently gathering up what fragments of the old Royal power still 
survived, and availing himself of whatever new resources offered 
themselves. If he could not undo what Puritanism had done in 
England, he could undo its work in Scotland and in Ireland. Before 
the Civil War these kingdoms had served as useful checks on English 
liberty, and by simply regarding the Union which the Long Parliament 
and the Protector had brought about as a nullity in lav/ it was possible 
they might become checks again. In his undoing the Union Charles was 
supported by Clarendon and the Constitutional loyalists, partly from 
sheer abhorrence of changes wrought by their political opponents, and 
partly from a dread that the Scotch and Irish members would form a 
party in the English Parliament which would always be at the service 
of the Crown. In both the lesser kingdoms too a measure which 
seemed to restore somewhat of their independence was for the moment 
popular. But the results of this step were quick in developing them- 
selves. In Scotland the Covenant was at once abolished. The new 
Scotch Parliament at Edinburgh, which soon won the name of the 
Drunken Parliament, outdid the wildest loyalty of the English 
Cavaliers by annulling in a single Act all the proceedings of its 
predecessors during the last eight-and-twenty years. By this measure 
the whole Church system of Scotland fell legally to the ground. The 
General Assembly had already been prohibited from meeting by 
Cromwell ; the kirk-sessions and ministers' synods were now sus- 
pended. The bishops were again restored to their spiritual pre- 
eminence, and to their seats in Parliament, An iniquitous trial sent 
the Earl of Argyle, the only noble strong enough to oppose the 
Royal will, to the block. The government was entrusted to a knot 
of profligate statesmen who were directed by Lord Lauderdale, one of 
the ablest and most unscrupulous of the King's ministers ; and their 
policy was steadily directed to the two purposes of humbling Presbyte- 
rianism — as the force which could alone restore Scotland to freedom and 
enable her to lend aid as before to English hberty in any struggle 
with the Crown — and of raising a Royal army which might be ready in 
case of trial to march over the border to the King's support. In ! 
Ireland the dissolution of the Union brought back the bishops to their ' 



620 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



sees ; but whatever wish Charles may have had to restore the balance 
of Catholic and Protestant as a source of power to the Crown was 
baffled by the obstinate resistance of the Protestant settlers to any 
plans for redressing the confiscations of Cromwell. Five years of 
bitter struggle between the dispossessed loyalists and the new occu- 
pants left the Protestant ascendency unimpaired ; and in spite of a 
nominal surrender of one-third of the confiscated estates to their old 
possessors, hardly a sixth of the profitable land in the island remained 
in CathoHc holding. The claims of the Duke of Ormond too made it 
necessary to leave the government in his hands, and Ormond's loyalty 
was too moderate and constitutional to lend itself to any of the 
schemes of absolute rule which under Tyrconnell played so great a 
part in the next reign. But the severance of the two kingdoms 
from England was in itself a gain to the Royal authority ; and 
Charles turned quietly to the building up of a Royal army at home. 
A standing army had become so hateful a thing to the body of the 
nation, and above all to the Royalists whom the New Model had 
trodden under foot, that it was impossible to propose its establish- 
ment. But in the mind of both the Royal brothers their father's down- 
fall had been owing to the want of a disciplined force which would 
have trampled out the first efforts of national resistance ; and while 
disbanding the New Model, Charles availed himself of the alarm 
created by a mad rising of some Fifth-Monarchy men in London under 
an old soldier called Venner to retain ^yq thousand horse and foot in 
his service under the name of his guards. A body of "gentlemen 
of quality and veteran soldiers, excellently clad, mounted, and ordered," 
was thus kept ready for service near the Royal person ; and in spite 
of the scandal which it aroused the King persisted, steadily but 
cautiously, in gradually increasing its numbers. Twenty years later it 
had grown to a force of seven thousand foot and one thousand seven 
hundred horse and dragoons at home, with a reserve of six fine regi- 
ments abroad in the service of the United Provinces. 

But Charles was too quick-witted a man to believe, as his brother 
James believed, that it was possible to break down English freedom 
by the Royal power or by a few thousand men in arms. It was still 
less possible by such means to break down, as he wished to break 
down, English Protestantism. In heart, whether the story of his re- 
nunciation of Protestantism during his exile be true or no, he had long 
ceased to be a Protestant. Whatever religious feeling he had was on 
the side of Catholicism ; he encouraged conversions among his courtiers, 
and the last act of his life was to seek formal admission into the 
Roman Church. But his feelings were rather political than religious. 
He saw that despotism in the State could hardly co- exist with free 
inquiry and free action in matters of the conscience, and that govern- 
ment, in his own words, "was a safer and easier thing where the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



621 



authority was believed infallible and the faith and submission of the 
people were implicit." The difficulties of a change of religion probably 
seemed the less to him that he had long lived abroad, where the 
sight of a people changing its belief with a change in its sove- 
reign's faith was not a very rare one. But though he counted much 
on the dissensions between Protestant Churchmen and Protestant 
Dissenters, and two years after his accession despatched a secret 
agent to Rome to arrange a reconciliation with the Papacy, he saw 
that for any real success in his political or religious aim.s he must seek 
resources elsewhere than at home. At this moment France was the 
dominant power in Europe. Its young King, Lewis the Fourteenth, 
avowed himself the champion of Catholicism and despotism against 
civil and religious liberty throughout the world. France was the 
wealthiest of European powers, and her subsidies could free Charles 
from dependence on his Parliament. Her army was the finest in the 
world, and French soldiers could put down any resistance from 
English patriots. The aid of Lewis could alone realize the aims of 
Charles, and Charles was freed by nature from any shame or reluctance 
to pay the price which Lewis demanded for his aid. The price was 
that of a silent concurrence in his designs on Spain. Robbed of 
its chief source of wealth by the revolt of the United Provinces and 
the decay of Flanders, enfeebled within by the persecution of the 
Inquisition, by the suppression of civil freedom, and by a ruinous 
financial oppression, Spain had not only ceased to threaten Europe but 
herself trembled at the threats of France. The aim of Lewis was to 
rob it of the Low Countries, but the presence of the French in Flanders 
was equally distasteful to England and to Holland, and in such a con- 
test Spain was sure of the aid both of these states and of the Empire. 
For some years Lewis contented himself with perfecting his army and 
preparing by skilful negotiations to make such a league of the great 
powers against him impossible. His first success in England was in 
the marriage of the King. Portugal, which had only just shaken off 
the rule of Spain, was really dependent upon France ; and in accept- 
ing the hand of Catharine of Braganza in spite of the protests of 
Spain, Charles announced his adhesion to the alliance of Lewis. 
Already English opinion saw the danger of such a course, and veered 
round to the Spanish side. As early as 1661 the London mob backed 
the Spanish ambassador in a street squabble for precedence with the 
ambassador of France. " We do all naturally love the Spanish," says 
Pepys, " and hate the French." The sale of Dunkirk, the one result 
of CromwelPs victorie. to France fanned the national irritation to 
frenzy; and the war wiu. Holland seemed at one time likely to end 
in a war with Lewis. The war was in itself a serious stumbling- 
block in the way of his projects. To aid either side was to throw^ the 
other on the aid of Austria and Spain, and to build up a league ;vhich 



622 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



would check France in its aims ; and yet the peace which could alone 
enable Lewis to seize Flanders by keeping the states of Europe dis- 
united was impossible without some sort of intervention. He was 
forced therefore to give aid to Holland, and the news of his purpose 
at once roused England to a hope of war. When Charles announced 
it to the Houses, "there was a great noise/' says Louvois, "in the 
Parliament to show the joy of the two Houses at the prospect of a 
fight with us.'' But the dexterous delays of Charles were seconded 
by the skill with which Lewis limited his aid to the exact force 
which was needful to bring about a close of the war, and the sudden 
conclusion of peace again left the ground clear for his diplomatic 
intrigues. 

In England the irritation was great and universal, but it took a turn 
which helped to carry out the plans of the King. From the moment 
when his bill to vest a dispensing power in the Crown had been defeated 
by Clarendon's stubborn opposition, Charles had resolved to rid himsel 
of the Chancellor. The Presbyterian party, represented by Ashley, united 
with Arlington and the ministers who were really in favour of Catholi- 
cism to bring about his overthrow. But Clarendon was still strong in 
the support of the House of Commons, whose Churchmanship was as 
resolute as his own. Foiled in their efforts to displace him, his rivals 
availed themselves of the jealousy of the merchant-class to drive him 
against his will into the war with Holland ; and though the Chancellor 
succeeded in forcing the Five Mile Act through the two Houses in the 
teeth of Ashley's protests, the calculations of his enemies were soon 
verified. The failures and shame of the war broke the union between 
Clarendon and Parliament ; his pride and venality had made him 
unpopular with the nation at large ; and the threat of an impeachment 
enabled Charles to gratify his long-hoarded revenge by the dismissal 
of the Chancellor from his office, and by an order to quit the realm. By 
the exile of Clarendon, the death of Southampton, and the retirement 
of Ormond and Nicholas, the Cavalier party in the Council ceased to 
exist ; and the section which had originally represented the Presby- 
terians, and which under tiie guidance of Ashley had struggled in 
vain for toleration against the Churchmen and the Parliament, came 
to the front of affairs. The religious policy of Charles had as yet 
been defeated by the sturdy Churchmanship of the Parliament, the 
influence of Clarendon, and the reluctance of the Presbyterians as a 
body to accept the Royal " indulgence " at the price of a toleration 
of Catholicism and a recognition of the King's power to dispense with 
Parhamentary statutes. But there were signs in the recent conduct 
of the Parhament and in its break with the Chancellor that the pohcy 
of persecution had been overdone. Charles trusted that the pressure 
put on the Nonconformists by the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile 
Act would drive them to seek relief at almost any cost, and he again 



[X.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



623 



proposed a general toleration. He looked to Ashley and his party j 
for support. But their temper was already changed. Instead of 
toleration they pressed for a union of Protestants which would have 
utterly foiled the King's projects ; ^nd a scheme of Protestant com- 
prehension, which had been approved' by the moderate divines on 
both sides, by Tillotson. and Stillingfleet on the part of the Church, 
as well as by Manton and Baxter on the part of the Nonconfor- 
mists, was laid by the new Minister before the House of Commons. 
Even its rejection failed to bring Ashley and his party back to their 
old position. They were still for toleration, but only for a toleration 
the l3enefit of which did not extend to Catholics, " in respect the laws 
have determined the principles of the Romish religion to be inconsistent 
with the safety of your Majesty's person and government." The 
I policy of the Council at home was determined, indeed, by the look 
of pubhc affairs abroad. Lewis had quickly shown the real cause of 
the eagerness with which he had pressed on the Peace of Breda 
between England and the Dutch. He had secured the non-inter- 
1 ference of the Emperor by a secret treaty which shared the Spanish 
dominions between the two monarchs in case the King of Spain 
died without an heir. England, as he believed, was held in check 
by Charles, and Holland was too exhausted by the late war to interfere 
alone. On the very day therefore on which the treaty was signed 
he sent in his formal claims on the Low Countries ; his army at 
once took the field, and the fall of six fortresses without resistance left 
Turenne master of Flanders. Holland at once protested and armed; 
but it could do nothing without aid, and its appeal to England re- 
mained unanswered. Lewis was ready to pay a high price for 
English neutrality. He offered to admit England to a share in the 
eventual partition of the Spanish monarchy, and to assign to her the 
American possessions of the Spanish crown, if she would assent to 
his schemes on the Low Countries. Charles was already, in fact, 
engaged in secret negotiations on this basis, but the projects of 
the King were soon checked by the threatening tone of the Parlia- 
ment, and by the attitude of his own ministers. To Ashley and 
his followers an increase of the French power seemed dangerous 
to English Protestantism. Even Arlington, Catholic as in heart 
I he was, thought more of the pohtical interests of England, and 
of the invariable resolve of its statesmen since Elizabeth's day to 
I keep the French out of Flanders, than of the interests of Catholicism. 
I Lewis, warned of his danger, still strove to win over English opinion 
I by offers of peace on moderate terms, while he was writing to Turenne, 
I " I am turning over in my head things that are far from impossible, 
j and go to carry them into execution whatever they may cost." Three 
J armies were, in fact, ready to march on Spain, Germany, and Flanders, 
when Arlington despatched Sir William Temple to the Hague, and 



Sec. III. 



024 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. III. 

Charles 

Second. 
1667- 
1673. 

Tlie 

Treaty of 

Dover. 



the signature of a Triple Alliance between England, Holland, and 
Sweden bound Lewis to the terms he had offered as a blind, and 
forced on him the Peace of Aix-la- Chapel] e. 

Few measures have won a greater popularity than the Triple Alliance. 
" It is the only good pubhc thing," says Pepys, "that hath been done 
since the King came to England."! Even the Tory Dryden counted 
among the worst of Shaftesbury's crimes that "the Triple Bond he 
broke." In form indeed the Alliance simply bound Lewis to adhere to 
terms of peace proposed by himself, and those advantageous terms. 
But, in fact, as we have seen, it utterly ruined his plans. It brought 
about that union of the powers of Europe against which, as he felt in- 
stinctively, his ambition would dash itself in vain. It was Arlington's 
aim to make the Alliance the nucleus of a greater confederation ; and 
he tried not only to perpetuate it, but to include within it the Swiss 
Cantons, the Empire, and the House of Austria. His efforts were 
foiled; but the "Triple Bond" bore within it the germs of the Grand 
Alliance which at last saved Europe. To England it at once brought 
back the reputation which she had lost '^mce the death of Cromwell. It 
was, in fact, a return to the Protector's j^olicy of a league with the Pro- 
testant powers of the North as a sc nty against the aggression of the 
Catholic powers of the South. But it was not so much the action of 
England which had galled the pride of Lewis, as the energy and suc- 

j cess of Holland. That " a nation of shopkeepers " (for Lewis applied 
the phrase to Holland long before Napoleon applied it to England) 
should have foiled his plans at the very moment of their realization, 

'"stung him," he owned, "to the quick." If he refrained from an 
instant attack it was to nurse a surer revenge. His steady aim during 
the three years which followed the Peace of Aix-la- Chapelle was to 
isolate the United Provinces, to bring about again the neutrality of the 
Empire, to break the Triple Alliance by detaching Sweden and by 
securing Charles, and to leave his prey without help, save from the idle 
goodwill of Brandenburg and Spain. His diplomacy was everywhere 
successful, but it was nowhere so successful as with England. Charles 
had been stirred to a momentary pride by the success of the Triple 
Alliance, but he had never seriously abandoned his policy, and he was 
resolute at last to play an active part in realizing it. It was clear that 
little was to be hoped for from his old plans of uniting the Catholics 
and the Nonconformists, and from this moment he surrendered him« 
self utterly to France. The Triple Alliance was hardly concluded when 
he declared to Lewis his purpose of entering into an alliance with him, 
offensive and defensive. He owned to being the only man in his king- 
dom who desired such a league, but he was determined to realize his 
desire, whatever might be the sentiments of his ministers. His minis- 
ters, indeed, he meant either to bring over to his schemes or to outwit. 
Two of them, Arlington and Sir Thomas Clifford, were Catholics in 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



625 



heart like the King ; and they were summoned, with the Duke of York, 
who had ah-eady secretly embraced Catholicism, to a conference in 
which Charles, after pledging them to secresy, declared himself a 
Catholic, and asked their counsel as to the means of establishing the 
: Catholic religion in his realm. It was resolved by the four to apply 
; to Lewis for aid in this purpose ; and Charles proceeded to seek from 
;, the King a " protection," to use the words of the French ambassador, 
c " of which he has always hoped to feel the powerful effects in the execu- 
,, tion of his design of changing the present state of religion in England 
ifor a better, and of establishing his authority so as to be able to retain 
.his subjects in the obedience they owe him." He offered to declare 
5 his religion, and to join France in an attack on Holland, if Lewis 
I would grant him a subsidy equal to a million a year. On this basis a 
i secret treaty was negotiated in the year 1670 at Dover between 
■ Charles and his sister Henrietta, the Duchess of Orleans. It pro- 
ivided that Charles should announce his conversion, and that in case 
'of any disturbance arising from such a step he should be supported 
I by a French army and a Fre^"^^ subsidy. War was to be declared by 
jboth powers against Holland^- jilngland furnishing a small land force, 
'but bearing the chief burthen of t contest at sea, on condition of an 
jannual subsidy of three millions of francs. In the event of the King 
of Spain's death without a son, Charles promised to support France 
in her claims upon Flanders. 
j Nothing marks better the political profligacy of the age than that 
Arlington, the author of the Triple Alliance, should have been chosen 
las the confidant of Charles in his Treaty of Dover. But to all save 
Arlington and Clifford the King's change of religion or his political 
laims remained utterly unknown. It would have been impossible to 
jobtain the consent of the party in the Royal Council which repre- 
isented the old Presbyterians, of Ashley or Lauderdale or the Duke of 
.Buckingham, to the Treaty of Dover. But it was possible to trick 
I them into approval of a war with Holland by playing on their desire 
ifor a toleration of the Nonconformists. The announcement of the 
iKing's Catholicism was therefore deferred ; and a series of mock 
Qegotiations, carried on through Buckingham, ended in the conclu- 
sion of a sham treaty which was communicated to Lauderdale and 
to Ashley, a treaty which suppressed all mention of the rehgious 
changes or of the promise of French aid in bringing them about, and 
jsimply stipulated for a joint war against the Dutch. In such a war 
Ithere was no formal breach of the Triple Alliance, for the Triple 
Alliance only provided against an attack on the dominions of Spain, 
|and Ashley and his colleagues were lured into assent to it in 167 1 by 
ithe promise of a toleration on their own terms. Charles in fact yielded 
the point to which he had hitherto clung, and, as Ashley demanded, 
promised that no Catholic should be benefited by the Indulgence. The 

S S 



626 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Ckap. 



Sec. III. 
Charles 

THE 

Second. 
1667- 
1673. 



1672, 



The War 

with 
Holland. 



bargain once struck, and his ministers outwitted, it only remained for 
Charles to outwit his Parliament. A large subsidy was demanded for 
the fleet, under the pretext of upholding the Triple Alliance, and 
the subsidy was no sooner granted than the two Houses were ad- 
journed. Fresh supplies were obtained by closing the Exchequer and 
suspending — under Clifford's advice — the payment of either principal 
or interest on loans advanced to the public Treasury. The measure 
spread bankruptcy among half the goldsmiths of London ; but it was 
followed in 1672 by one yet more starthng, the Declaration of Indul- 
gence. By virtue of his ecclesiastical powers the King ordered " that 
all manner of penal laws on matters ecclesiastical against whatever 
sort of Nonconformists or recusants should be from that day suspended," 
and gave liberty of public worship to all dissidents save Catholics, who 
were allowed to practise their religion only in private houses. The 
effect of the Declaration went far to justify Ashley and his colleagues 
(if anything could justify their course) in the bargain by which they 
purchased toleration. Ministers returned, after years of banishment, 
to their homes and their flocks. Chapels were reopened. The gaols 
were emptied. Bunyan left his prison at Bedford ; and thousands of 
Quakers, who had been the especial objects of persecution, were set 
free to worship God after their own fashion. 

The Declaration of Indulgence was at once followed by a declara- 
tion of war against the Dutch on the part of both England and France ; 
and the success of the Allies seemed at first complete. The French 
army passed the Rhine, overran three of the States without opposition, 
and pushed its outposts to within sight of Amsterdam. It was only 
by skill and desperate courage that the Dutch ships under De Ruyter 
held the English fleet under the Duke of York at bay in an obstinate 
battle off the coast of Suffolk. The triumph of the English cabinet 
was shown in the elevation of the leaders of both its parties. Ashley j 
was made Chancellor and Earl of Shaftesbury, and Clifford became 
Lord Treasurer. But the Dutch were saved by the pride with which 
Lewis rejected their offers of submission, and by the approach of 
winter which suspended his operations. The plot of the two 
Courts hung for success on the chances of a rapid surprise ; and 
with the appointment of the young Prince of Orange to the com- 
mand of the Dutch army all chance of a surprise was over. Young 
as he was, William of Orange at once displayed the cool courage 
and tenacity of his race. "Do you not see your country is lost?" 
asked the Duke of Buckingham, who had been sent to negotiate at 
the Hague. " There is a sure way never to see it lost," rephed Wiiham,! 
" and that is, to die in the last ditch." The unexpected delay forced on 
Charles a fresh assembly of the Parhament ; for the supplies which he 
had so unscrupulously procured were already exhausted, while the 
closing of the Treasury had shaken all credit and rendered it impossible 



ix; 



THE REVOLUTION, 



021 



to raise a loan. It was necessary in 1673 to appeal to the Commons, 
but the Commons met in a mood of angry distrust. The war, unpopu- 
lar as it was, they left alone. What overpowered all other feelings was 
a vague sense, which we know now to have been justified by the facts, 
that liberty and rehgion were being unscrupulously betrayed. There 
was a suspicion that the whole armed force of the nation was in 
Catholic hands. The Duke of York was believed to be in heart a 
Papist, and he was in command of the fleet. Catholics had been 
placed as officers m the force which was being raised for the war in 
Holland, and a French general, the Count of Schomberg, had been sent 
to take command of it. Lady Castlemaine, the King's mistress, paraded 
her conversion ; and doubts were fast gathering over the Protestantism 
|of the King. There was a general suspicion that a plot was on foot 
for the establishment of Catholicism and despotism, and that the war 
and the Indulgence were parts of the plot. The change of temper in 
the Commons was marked by the appearance of what was from that 
time called the Country party, with Lords Russell and Cavendish and 
Sir William Coventry at its head, a party which sympathized with the 
j Nonconformists but looked on it as its first duty to guard against 
the designs of the Court. As to the Declaration of Indulgence how- 
ever, all parties in the House were at one. The Commons resolved 
" that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but 
by consent of Parliament," and refused supplies till the Declaration 
was recalled. The King yielded ; but the Declaration was no sooner 
recalled than a Test Act was passed through both Houses without 
opposition, which required from everyone in the civil and military 
employment of the State the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, a 
' declaration against transubstantiation, and a reception of the sacra- 
jment accroding to the rites of the Church of England. CHfford at 
once counselled resistance, and Buckingham talked flightily about 
I bringing the army to London, but Arlington saw that all hope of 
' carrying the " great plan " through was at an end, and pressed Charles 
I to yield. A dissolution was the King's only resource, but in the temper 
! of the nation a new Parliament would have been yet more violent than 
the present one ; and Charles sullenly gave way. No measure has 
ever brought about more startling results. The Duke of York owned 
himself a Catholic, and resigned his office as Lord High Admiral. 
Throngs of excited people gathered round the Lord Treasurer's house 
at the news that Clifford, too, had owned to being a Catholic and had 
laid down his staff of office. Their resignation was followed by that 
of hundreds of others in the anny and the civil service of the Crown. 
On pubhc opinion the effect was wonderful. " I dare not write all the 
strange talk of the town," says Evelyn. The resignations were held to 
have proved the existence of the dangers which the Test Act had been 
passed to meet. From this moment all trust in Charles was at 

s s 2 



628 



HISTOR V OF THE EI^GLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



an end, "The King," Shaftesbury said bitterly, "who if he had been 
so happy as to have been born a private gentleman had certainly 
passed for a man of good parts, excellent breeding, and well natm-ed, 
hath now, being a Prince, brought his affairs to that pass that there is 
not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or 
put any confidence in his word or friendship." 



Section IV — Danby. 1673—1678. 

[Authorities,— Ks, before. Mr. Christie's " Life of Shaftesbury," a defence, 
and in some respects a successful defence, of that statesman's career, throws a 
fresh light on the poUcy of the Whig party during this period.] 



<l! 



The one man in England on whom the discovery of the King's 
perfidy fell with the most crushing effect was the Chancellor, Lord 
Shaftesbury. Throughout his life Ashley Cooper had piqued himself 
on a penetration which read the characters of men around him, and 
on a political instinct which discerned every coming change. His 
self-reliance was wonderful. In mere boyhood he saved his estate 
from the greed of his guardians by boldly appealing in person to Noy, 
who was then Attorney- General. As an undergraduate at Oxford he 
organized a rebellion of the freshmen against the oppressive customs 
which were enforced by the senior men of his college, and succeeded 
in abolishing them. At eighteen he was a member of the Short 
Parliament. On the outbreak of the Civil War he took part with 
the King; but in the midst of the Royal successes he foresaw the 
ruin of the Royal cause, passed to the Parliament, attached himself 
to the fortunes of Cromwell, and became member of the Council 
of State. A temporary disgrace during the last years of the Protec- 
torate only quickened him. to a restless hatred which did much 
to bring about its fall. We have already seen his bitter invectives 
against the dead Protector, his intrigues with Monk, and the active part 
which he took, as member of the Council of State, in the King's recall. 
Charles rewarded his services with a peerage, and with promotion to 
a foremost share in the Royal Councils. Ashley was then a man of 
forty, and under the Commpnwealth he had been famous, in Dryden's 
eonternptuous phrase, as ^**the loudest bagpipe of the squeaking 
train ; '* but he was no sooner a minister of Charles than he flung 
himself into the debauchery of the Court with an ardour which sur- 
prised even his master. " You are the wickedest dog in England ! " 
laughed Charles at some unscrupulous jest of his councillor's. " Of a 
subject. Sir, I believe I am ! " was the unabashed reply. But the 
debauchery of Ashley was simply a mask. He was, in fact, temperate: 
by nature and habit, and his ill-health rendered any great excess 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



629 



impossible. Men soon found that the courtier who lounged in Lady 
Castlemaine's boudoir, or drank and jested with Sedley and Bucking- 
ham, was a diligent and able man of business. " He is a man,'^ says 
the puzzled Pepys, three years after the Restoration, " of great busi- 
ness, and yet of pleasure and dissipation too." His rivals were as 
envious of the ease and mastery with which he dealt with questions of 
finance, as of the "nimble v/it" which won the favour of the King. 
Even in later years his industiy earned the grudging praise of his ene- 
mies. Dryden owned that as Chancellor he was " swift to despatch and 
easy of access,'^ and wondered at the restless activity which " refused 
his age the needful hours of rest." His activity indeed was the more 
wonderful that his health was utterly broken. An accident in early 
days left behind it an abiding weakness, whose traces were seen in 
the furrows which seared his long pale face, in the feebleness of his 
health, and the nei-vous tremor which shook his puny frame. The 
" pigmy body " seemed " fretted to decay " by the " fiery soul " within 
it. But pain and weakness brought with them no sourness of spirit. 
Ashley was attacked more unscrupulously than any statesman save 
Walpole ; but Burnet, who did not love him, owns that he was never 
bitter or angry in speaking of his assailants. Even the wit with 
which he crushed them was commonly good-humoured. " When will 
you have done preaching ? '^ a bishop murmured testily, as Shaftesbury 
' was speaking in the House of Peers. " When I am a bishop, my 
j Lord ! '^ was the laughing reply. 

As a statesman Ashley not only stood high among his contemporaries 
from his wonderful readiness and industry, but he stood far above 
'them in his scorn of personal profit. Even Dryden, while raking 
■'together every fault in the Chancellor, owns that his hands were clean. 
!As a political leader his position was to modern eyes odd enough. In 
'religion he was at best a Deist, with some fanciful notions '^ that after 
'death our souls lived in stars," and his life was that of a debauchee. 
But, Deist and debauchee as he was, he represented, as we have seen, 
Ithe Presbyterian and Nonconformist party in the Royal Council. 
jHe was the steady and vehement advocate of toleration, but his 
advocacy was based on purely political grounds. He saw that per- 
secution would fail to bring back the Dissenters to the Church, and 
that the effort to recall them only left Protestants disunited and at 
'i^he mercy of their enemies. But in the temper of England after the 
^jRestoration he saw no hope of obtaining toleration save from the 
policy of the King. Wit, debauchery, rapidity in the despatch of 
business, were all used as means to keep Charles firm in his plans 
of toleration, and to secure him as a friend in the struggle which 
Ashley carried on against the intolerance of Clarendon. Charles, as 
vve have seen, had his own game to play and his own reasons for 
protecting Ashley during his vehement but fruitless struggle against 



630 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[CharI 



the Test and Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, and the perse- 
cution of the dissidents. Fortune at last smiled on the unscrupulous . 
ability with which he entangled Clarendon in the embarrassments of 
the Dutch war of 1664, and took advantage of the alienation of the 
Parliament to ensure his fall. Of the yet more unscrupulous bargain 
which followed w^e have already spoken. Ashley bought, as he be- 
lieved, the Declaration of Indulgence, the release of the imprisoned 
Nonconformists, and freedom of worship for all dissidents, at the price 
of a consent to the second attack on Holland ; and he was looked on 
by the public at large as the minister most responsible both for the 
measures he advised and the measures he had nothing to do with. 
But while facing the gathering storm of unpopularity Ashley learnt* 
in a moment of drunken confidence the secret of the King's religion. 
He owned to a friend "his trouble at the black cloud which was 
gathering over England ; " but, troubled as he was, he still believed 
himself strong enough to use Charles for his own purposes. His 
acceptance of the Chancellorship and of the Earldom of Shaftesbury, 
as well as his violent defence of the war on opening the Parliament, 
identified him yet more with the Royal policy. It was at this moment, 
if we credit a statement of doubtful authority in itself but which 
squares with the sudden change in his course, that he learnt from 
Arlington the secret of the Treaty of Dover. Whether this were so, 
or whether suspicion, as in the people at large, deepened into certainty, 
Shaftesbury saw he had been duped. To the bitterness of such a 
discovery was added the bitterness of having aided in schemes which 
he abhorred. His change of policy was rapid and complete. He 
suddenly pressed for the withdrawal of the Declaration of Indulgence. 
Alone among his fellow-ministers he supported the Test Act with extra- 
ordinary vehemence. His success in displacing James and Clifford, 
and in creating a barrier against any future Catholic projects, gave 
him hopes of revenging the deceit which had been practised on him 
by forcing his policy on the King. For the moment indeed Charles 
was helpless. He found himself, as he had told Lewis long before, 
alone in his realm. The Test Act had been passed unanimously 
by both Houses. Even the Nonconformists deserted him, and 
preferred persecution to the support of his plans. The dismissal of 
the Catholic officers made the employment of force, if he ever con- 
templated it, impossible, while the ill success of the Dutch war robbed 
him of all hope of aid from France. The firmness of the Prince of 
Orange had at last roused the stubborn energy of his countrymen. 
The French conquests on land were slowly won back, and at sea 
the fleet of the allies was still held iii check by the fine seamanship of 
De Ruyter. Nor was William less successful in diplomacy than in 
war. The House of Austria was at last roused to action by the 
danger which threatened Europe- and its union with the United 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



^31 



Provinces laid the foundation of the Grand Alliance. Shaftesbury 
resolved to put an end to the war ; and for this purpose he threw 
himself into hearty alliance with the Country party in the Com- 
mons, and welcomed the Duke of Ormond and Prince Rupert, who 
were looked upon as *' great Parliament men," back to the Royal 
Council. It was to Shaftesbury's influence that Charles attributed 
the dislike which the Commons displayed to the war, and their 
refusal of a grant of supplies for it until fresh religious securities 
were devised. It was at his instigation that an address was pre- 
sented by both Houses against the plan of marrying James to a 
Catholic princess, Mary of Modena. But the projects of Shaftesbury 
were suddenly interrupted by an unexpected act of vigour on the part 
of the King. The Houses were no sooner prorogued in November 
than the Chancellor was ordered to deliver up the Seals. 

"It is only laying down my gown and buckling on my sword," 
Shaftesbury is said to have replied to the Royal bidding ; and, though 
the words were innocent enough, for the sword was part of the usual 
dress of a gentleman which he must necessarily resume when he laid 
aside the gown of the Chancellor, they were taken as conveying a covert 
threat. He was still determined to force on the King a peace with 
the States. But he looked forward to the dangers of the future with 
even greater anxiety than to those of the present. The Duke of York, 
the successor to the throne, had owned himself a Catholic, and almost 
everyone agreed that securities for the national religion would be 
necessary in the case of his accession. But Shaftesbury saw, and it 
is his especial merit that he did see, that with a king like James, con- 
vinced of his Divine Right and bigoted in his rehgious fervour, 
securities were valueless. From the first he detennined to force on 
Charles his brother's exclusion from the throne, and his resolve was 
justified by the Revolution which finally did the work he proposed to 
do. Unhappily he was equally determined to fight Charles with 
weapons as vile as his own. The result of Clifford's resignation, of 
James's acknowledgment of his conversion, had been to destroy all 
belief in the honesty of public men. A panic of distrust had begun. 
The fatal truth was whispered that Charles himself was a Catholic. In 
spite of the Test Act, it was suspected that men Cathohcs in heart still 
held high office in the State, and we know that in Arlington's case the 
suspicion was just. Shaftesbury seized on this public alarm, stirred above 
all by a sense of inability to meet the secret dangers which day after 
day was disclosing, as the means of carrying out his plans. He began 
fanning the panic by tales of a Papist rising in London, and of a coming 
Irish revolt with a French army to back it. He retired to his house in 
the City to find security against a conspiracy which had been formed, 
he said, to cut his throat. Meanwhile he rapidly organized the Country 
Darty in the Parliament, and placed himself openly at its head. An 



632 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



address for the removal of ministers " popishly affected or otherwise 
obnoxious or dangerous " was presented on the reassembling of the 
Houses in 1674, and the refusal of supplies made a continuance of the 
war impossible. A bill was brought in to prevent all Catholics from 
approaching the Court, in other words for removing James from the 
King's Councils. A far more important bill was that of the Protestant 
Securities, which was pressed by Shaftesbury, Halifax, and Carlisle, the 
leaders of the new Opposition in the House of Lords, a bill which 
enacted that any prince of the blood should forfeit his right to the 
Crown on his marriage with a Catholic. The bill, which was the first 
sketch of the later Exclusion Bill, failed to pass, but its failure left the 
Houses excited and alarmed. Shaftesbury was busy intriguing in the 
City, corresponding with WiUiam of Orange, and pressing for a war with 
France which Charles could only avert by an appeal to Lewis, a sub- 
sidy from whom enabled him to prorogue the Parliament. But Charles 
saw that the time had come to give way. " Things have turned out 
ill," he said to Temple with a burst of unusual petulance, " but had I 
been well served I might have made a good business of it." His conces- 
sions however were as usual complete. He dismissed Buckingham and 
Arlington. He made peace with the Dutch. But Charles was never 
more formidable than in the moment of defeat, and he had already 
resolved on a new policy by which the efforts of Shaftesbury might be 
held at bay. Ever since the opening of his reign he had clung to a 
system of balance, had pitted Churchman against Nonconformist, and 
Ashley against Clarendon, partly to preserve his own independence, and 
partly with a view of winning some advantage to the Catholics from the 
political strife. The temper of the Commons had enabled Clarendon to 
baffle the King's attempts ; and on his fall Charles felt strong enough 
to abandon the attempt to preserve a political balance, and had 
thrown himself on the support of Lewis and the Nonconformists in 
his new designs. But the new policy broke down like the old. The 
Nonconformists refused to betray the cause of Protestantism, and 
Shaftesbury, their leader, was pressing on measures which would 
rob Catholicism of the hopes it had gained from the conversion of 
James. In straits like these Charles resolved to win back the Com- 
mons by boldly adopting the policy on which the House was set. 
The majority of its members were still a mass of Cavalier Church- 
men, who regarded Sir Thomas Osborne, a dependant of Arlington's, 
as their representative in the Royal Councils. The King had 
already created Osborne Earl of Danby, and raised him to the post 
of Lord Treasurer in Clifford's room. In 1674 he frankly adopted 
the policy of his party in the Parliament. 

The policy of Danby was simply that of Clarendon. He had all 
Clarendon's love of the Church, his equal hatred of Popery and Dissent, 
his high notions of the prerogative tempered by a faith in Parliament 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



633 



and the law. The union between the Church and the Crown was ratified 
in a conference between Danby and the bishops at Lambeth ; and its 
first fruits were seen in the rigorous enforcement of the law against 
conventicles, and the exclusion of all Catholics from Court. The Lady 
Mary, the eldest child of James, was confirmed by the King's orders as 
a Protestant, while the Parhament which was assembled in 1675 was 
assured that the Test Act should be rigorously enforced. The change 
in the Royal policy came not a moment too soon. As it was, the aid of 
the Cavalier party which rallied round Danby hardly saved the King 
from the humiliation of being forced to recall the troops he still main- 
tained in the French service. To gain a m.ajority on this point Danby 
was forced to avail himself of a resource which from this time played 
for nearly a hundred years an important part in English politics. He 
bribed lavishly. He was more successful in winning back the majority 
of the Commons from their alliance v\dth the Country party by reviving 
the old spirit of religious persecution. He proposed that the test which 
had been imposed by Clarendon on municipal officers should be ex- 
tended to all functionaries of the State ; that eveiy member of either 
House, every magistrate and public ofiicer, should swear never to take 
arms against the King or to '' endeavour any alteration of the Protestant 
religion now established by law in the Church of England, or any altera- 
tion in the Government in Church and State as it is by law established." 
The Bill was forced through the Lords by the bishops and the Cavalier 
party, and its passage through the Commons was only averted by a 
quarrel on privilege between the two Houses which Shaftesbury dex- 
terously fanned into flame. On the other hand the Country party 
remained strong enough to refuse supplies. Eager as they were for 
the war with France which Danby promised, the Commons could not 
trust the King ; and Danby was soon to discover how wise their distrust 
had been. For the Houses were no sooner prorogued than Charles 
revealed to him the negotiations he had been all the while carry- 
ing on with Lewis, and required him to sign a treaty by which, on 
consideration of a yearly pension guaranteed on the part of France, 
the two sovereigns bound themselves to enter into no engagements 
with other powers, and to lend each other aid in case of rebellion 
in their dominions. Such a treaty not only bound England to depen- 
dence on France, but freed the King from all Parliamentary control. 
But his minister pleaded in vain for delay and for the advice of the 
Council. Charles answered his entreaties by signing the treaty with 
his own hand. Danby found himself duped by the King as Shaftes- 
bury had found himself duped ; but his bold temper was only spurred 
to fresh plans for rescuing the King from his bondage to Lewis. To 
do this the first step was to reconcile the King and the Parliament 
which met in 1676 after a prorogation of fifteen months. The 
Country party stood in the way of such a reconciliation, but Danby 



634 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



resolved to break its strength by measures of unscrupulous vigour, foi 
which a blunder of Shaftesbury's gave an opportunity. Shaftesbury 
despaired of bringing the House of Commons, elected as it had been 
fifteen years before in a moment of religious and political reaction, to 
any steady opposition to the Crown. He had already moved an addresii 
for a dissolution ; and he now urged that as a statute of Edward the 
Third ordained that Parliaments should be held " once a year o/ 
oftener if need be," the Parliament by the recent prorogation of a 
year and a half had ceased legally to exist. The Triennial Act de 
prived such an argument of any force. But Danby represented if 
as a contempt of the House, and the Lords at his bidding com- 
mitted its supporters, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Salisbury, and Whar 
ton, to the Tower in 1677. While the Opposition cowered under the 
blow, Danby pushed on a measure which was designed to win back 
alarmed Churchmen to confidence in the Crown. By the bill for the 
Security of the Church it was provided that on the succession of a 
king not a member of the Established Church the appointment of 
bishops should be vested in the existing prelates, and that the King's 
children should be placed in the guardianship of the Archbishop of 
Canterbury. 

The bill however failed in the Commons ; and a grant of supply 
was only obtained by Danb/s profuse bribery. The progress of the 
war abroad, indeed, was rousing panic in England faster than Danby 
could allay it. The successes of the French arms in Flanders, and 
a defeat of the Prince of Orange at Cassel stirred the whole country 
to a cry for war. The House of Commons echoed the cry in an 
address to the Crown ; but Charles parried the blow by demanding a 
supply before the war was declared, and on the refusal of the still 
suspicious House prorogued the Parliament. Fresh and larger sub- 
sidies from France enabled him to continue this prorogation for seven 
months. But the silence of the Parliament did little to silence the 
country ; and Danby took aa vantage of the popular cry for war to 
press an energetic course of action on the King. In its will to 
check French aggression the Cavalier party was as earnest as the 
Puritan, and Danby aimed at redeeming his failure at home by unit- 
ing the Parliament through a vigorous policy abroad. As usual, 
Charles gave way. He was himself for the moment uneasy at the 
appearance of the French on the Flemish coast, and he owned 
that " he could never live at ease with his subjects " if Flanders were 
abandoned. He allowed Danby, therefore, to press on both parties 
the necessity for mutual concessions, and to define the new attitude of 
England by a step which was to produce results far more momentous 
than any of which either Charles or his minister dreamed. The 
Prince of Orange was suddenly invited to England, and wedded to Mary, 
the eldest child of the Duke of York. As the King was childless, 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



635 



and James had no son, Mary was presumptive heiress of the Crown. 
The marriage therefore promised a close poHtical union in the future 
with Holland, and a corresponding opposition to the ambition of 
France. With the country it was popular as a Protestant match, and 
as ensuring a Protestant successor to James. Lewis was bitterly 
angered ; he rejected the English propositions of peace, and again set 
his army in the field. Danby was ready to accept the challenge, and 
the withdrawal of the English ambassador from Paris was followed in 
1678 by an assembly of the Parliament. A warlike speech from the 
throne was answered by a warlike address from the House, supplies 
were voted, and an army raised. But the actual declaration of war 
still failed to appear. While Danby threatened war, Charles was 
busy turning the threat to his own profit, and gaining time by 
prorogations for a series of base negotiations. At one stage he de- 
manded from Lewis a fresh pension for the next three years as the 
price of his good offices with the allies. Danby stooped to write the 
demand, and Charles added, " This letter is written by my order, C.R." 
A force of three thousand English soldiers were landed at Ostend ; 
but the allies were already broken by their suspicions of the King's real 
policy, and Charles soon agreed for a fresh pension to recall the bri- 
gade. The bargain was hardly struck when Lewis withdrew the terms 
of peace he had himself offered, and on the faith of which England had 
ostensibly retired from the scene. Danby at once offered fresh aid to the 
allies, but all faith in England was lost. One power after another 
gave way to the new French demands, and the virtual victory of Lewis 
was secured in July, 1678, by the Peace of Nimeguen. 

The Treaty of Nimeguen not only left France the arbiter of Europe, 
but it left Charles the master of a force of twenty thousand men levied 
for the war he refused to declare, and with nearly a million of French 
money in his pocket. His course had roused into fresh life the old 
suspicions of his perfidy, and of a secret plot with Lewis for the ruin of 
English freedom and of English religion. . That there was such a plot 
we know ; and the hopes of the Catholic party mounted as fast as the 
panic of the Protestants. Coleman, the secretary of the Duchess of 
York, and a busy intriguer, had gained sufficient knowledge of the real 
plans of the King and of nis brother to induce him to beg for money 
from Lewis in the work of furthering them by intrigues in the Parliament. 
A passage from his letter gives us a glimpse of the wild hopes which 
were stirring among the hotter Catholics of the time. " They had a 
mighty work on their hands," he wrote, "no less than the conversion of 
three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent 
heresy which had so long domineered over a great part of the northern 
world. Success would give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion 
that it had received since its birth." The letter was secret ; but the 
hopes of the Catholics were known, and the alarm grew fast. Mean- 



Sbc IV. 

Daney. 
1673- 
1678. 



6:^6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



while one of the vile impostors who are always thrown to the surface 
at times of great public agitation was ready to take advantage of 
the general alarm by the invention of a Popish plot. Titus Gates, a 
Baptist minister before the Restoration, a curate and navy chaplain 
after it, but left penniless by his infamous character, had sought bread 
in a conversion to Catholicism, and had been received into Jesuit 
houses at Valladolid and St. Omer. While he remained there, he 
learnt the fact of a secret meeting of the Jesuits in London, which 
was probably nothing but the usual congregation of the order. On his 
expulsion for misconduct this single fact widened in his fertile brain 
into a plot for the subversion of Protestantism and the death of the 
King. His story was laid before Charles, and received with cool 
increduHty ; but Gates made affidavit of its truth before a London 
magistrate, Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, and at last managed to appear 
before the Council. He declared that he had been trusted with letters 
which disclosed the Jesuit plans. They were stirring rebeflioti in 
Ireland ; in Scotland they disguised themselves as Cameronians ; in 
England their aim was to assassinate the King, and to leave the 
throne open to the Papist Duke of York. But no letters appeared to 
support these monstrous charges, and Gates would have been dis- 
missed with contempt but for the seizure of Coleman's correspondence. 
His letters gave a new colour to the plot. Danby himself, conscious 
of the truth that there were designs which Charles dared not avow, 
was shaken in his rejection of the disclosures, and inclined to use 
them as weapons to check the King in his Catholic policy. But 
a more unscrupulous hand had already seized on the growing panic. 
Shaftesbury, released after a long imprisonment and desperate of other 
courses, threw himself into the plot. " Let the Treasurer cry as loud 
as he pleases against Popery," he laughed, " I will cry a note louder." ^ 
But no cry was needed to heighten the popular frenzy from the 
moment when Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, a magistrate before whom 
Gates had laid his information, was found in a field near London with 
his sword run through his heart. His death was assumed to be 
murder, and the murder to be an attempt of the Jesuits to "stifle the 
plot.'' A solemn funeral added to public agitation ; and the two 
Houses named committees to Investigate the charges made by Gates. 
In this investigation Shaftesbury took the lead. Whatever his 
personal ambition may have been, his public aims in all that followed 
were wise and far-sighted. He aimed at forcing Charles to dissolve 
the Parliament and appeal again to the nation. He aimed at forcing 
on Charles a ministry which should break his dependence on France 
and give a constitutional turn to his policy. He saw that no guaranty 
would really avail to meet the danger of a Catholic sovereign, and he 
aimed at excluding James from the throne. But in pursuing these aims 
he rested wholly on the plot. He fanned the DODuJar panic by accept- 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



637 



ing without question some fresh depositions in which Oates charged five 
CathoHc peers with part in the Jesuit conspiracy. The peers were 
sent to the Tower, and two thousand suspected persons were hurried 
to prison. A proclamation ordered every CathoHc to leave London. 
The trainbands were called to arms, and patrols paraded through the 
streets, to guard against the Catholic rising which Oates declared to 
be at hand. Meanwhile Shaftesbury turned the panic to pohtical 
account by forcing through Parliament against the fierce opposition of 
the Court party a bill which excluded Catholics from a seat in either 
House. The exclusion remained in force for a century and a half; 
but it had really been aimed against the Duke of York, and Shaftes- 
bury was defeated by a proviso which exempted James from the 
operation of the bill. The plot too which had been supported for 
four months by the sole evidence of Oates, began to hang fire ; but a 
promise of reward brought forward a villain, named Bedloe, with tales 
beside which those of Oates seemed tame. The two informers were 
now pressed forward by an infamous rivalry to stranger and stranger 
revelations. Bedloe swore to the existence of a plot for the landing 
of a Papist army and a general massacre of the Protestants. Oates 
capped the revelations of Bedloe by charging the Queen herself, at 
the bar of the Lords, with knowledge of the plot to murder her 
husband. Monstrous as such charges were, they revived the waning 
frenzy of the people and of the two Houses. The peers under arrest 
were ordered to be impeached. A new proclamation enjoined the 
arrest of every Catholic in the realm. A series of judicial murders 
began with the trial and execution of Coleman, which even now 
can only be remembered with hoiTor. But the alarm must soon 
have worn out had it only been supported by perjury. What gave 
force to the false plot was the existence of a true one. Coleman^s 
letters had won credit for the perjuries of Oates, and a fresh dis- 
covery now won credit for the perjuries of Bedloe. The English 
ambassador at Paris, Edward Montagu, returned home on a quar- 
rel with Danby, obtained a seat in the House of Commons, and in 
spite of the seizure of his papers laid on the table of the House 
the despatch which had been forwarded to Lewis, demanding pay- 
ment of the King^s services to France during the late negotiations. 
The House was thunderstruck ; for, strong as had been the general 
suspicion, the fact of the dependence of England on a foreign power 
had never before been proved. Danby's name was signed to the 
despatch, and he was at once impeached on a charge of high treason. 
But Shaftesbury was more eager to secure the election of a new 
Parliament than to punish his rival, and Charles was resolved to 
prevent at any price a trial which could not fail to reveal the disgrace- 
ful secret of his foreign policy. Charles was in fact at Shaftesbury^s 
mercy, and the bargain for which Shaftesbury had been playing had 



638 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



to be struck. The Earl agreed that the impeachment should be 
dropped, and the King promised that a new Parliament should be 
summoned, and a new ministry called into office. 



Section V.— Shaftesbury. 1679— 2*882. 

{^Authorities. — As before. We may add for this period Earl Russell's Life 
of his ancestor, William, Lord Russell.] 



When the Parliament met in March, 1679, the King's pledge was 
redeemed by the dismissal of Danby from his post of Treasurer, and 
the constitution of a new ministry. Shaftesbury, as its most important 
member, became President of the Council. The chiefs of the Country 
party, Lord Russell and Lord Cavendish, took their seats at the Doard 
with Lords Holies and Roberts, the older representatives of the 
Presbyterian party which had merged in the general Opposition. 
Savile, Lord Halifax, as yet known only as a keen and ingenious 
speaker, entered the ministry in the train of his own connection, 
Lord Shaftesbury, while Lord Essex and Lord Capel, two of the 
most popular among the Country leaders, went to the Treasury. The 
recall of Sir William Temple, the negotiator of the Triple Alliance, 
from his embassy at the Hague to fill the post of Secretary of State, 
promised a foreign policy which would again place England high 
among the European powers. Temple returned with a plan of 
administration which, fruitless as it directly proved, is of great 
importance as marking the silent change which was passing over 
the Constitution. Like many men of his time, he was equally alarmed 
at the power both of the Crown and of the Parliament. In moments 
of national excitement the power of the Houses seemed irresistible. 
They had overthrown (Clarendon. They had overthrown Clifford and 
the Cabal. They had just overthrown Danby. But though they were 
strong enough in the end to punish ill government, they showed no 
power of securing good government or of permanently influencing the 
policy of the Crown; For nineteen years, in fact, with a Parliament 
always sitting, Charles had had it all his own way. He had made 
war against the will of the nation, and he had refused to make war 
when the nation demanded it. While every Enghshman hated France, 
he had made England a mere dependency of the French King. The 
remedy for this state of things, as it was afterwards found, was a very 
simple one. By a change which we shall have to trace, the Ministry 
has now become a Committee of State-officers, named by the majority 
of the House of Commons from amongst the more prominent of its 
representatives in either House, whose object in accepting office is to 
do the will of that majority. So long as the majority of the House of 



IX.l 



THE REVOLUTION. 



^Y) 



Commons itself represents the more powerful current of public 
opinion it is clear that such an arrangement makes government an 
accurate reflection of the national will. But obvious as such a plan 
may seem to us, it had as yet occurred to no EngHsh statesman. 
Even to Temple the one remedy seemed to lie in the restoration of 
the Royal Council to its older powers. This body, composed as it 
was of the great officers of the Court, the Royal Treasurer and 
Secretaries, and a few nobles specially summoned to it by the sove- 
reign, formed up to the close of Elizabeth's reign a sort of delibera- 
tive assembly to which the graver matters of public administration 
were commonly submitted by the Crown. A practice, however, of 
previously submitting such measures to a smaller body of the more 
important councillors must always have existed ; and under James 
this secret committee, which was then known as the Cabala or Cabal, 
began almost wholly to supersede the Council itself. In the large and 
balanced Council which was formed after the Restoration all real 
power rested with the " Cabala " of Clarendon, Southampton, Ormond, 
Monk, and the two Secretaries ; and on Clarendon's fall these were 
succeeded by Chfford, Arhngton, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauder- 
dale. By a mere coincidence the initials of the latter names formed 
the word "Cabal," which has ever since retained the sinister mean- 
ing their unpopularity gave to it. The effect of these smaller 
committees had undoubtedly been to remove the check which the 
larger numbers and the more popular composition of the Royal 
Council laid upon the Crown. The unscrupulous projects which made 
the Cabal of Clifford and his fellows a by-word among English- 
men could never have been l2|id before a Council of great peers and 
hereditary officers of State, "^o Temple therefore the organization of 
the Council seem^ed to furnisfi a check on mere personal government 
which Parliament was unable to supply. ; For this purpose the Cabala, 
or Cabinet, as it was now becoming the fashion to term the confidential 
committee of the Council, was abolished. The Council itself was 
restricted to thirty members, and their joint income was not to fall 
below ;i^3oo,oco, a sum little less than what was estimated as the 
income of the whole House of Commons. A body of great nobles 
and proprietors, not too numerous for secret deliberation, and wealthy 
enough to counterbalance either the Commons or the Crown, would 
form. Temple hoped, a barrier against the violence and aggression of 
the one power, and a check on the mere despotism of the other. 

The new Council and the new ministry gave fair hope of a wise and 
patriotic government. But the difficulties were still great. The nation 
was frenzied with suspicion and panic. The elections to the new 
Parliament had taken place amidst a whirl of excitement which left 
no place for candidates of the Court ; and so unmanageable was the 
temper of the Commons that Shaftesbury was unable to carry out his 



640 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



part of the bargain with Charles. The Commons insisted on carrying 
the impeachment of Danby to the bar of the Lords. The appointment 
of the new ministry, indeed, was welcomed with a burst of general j( y ; 
but the disbanding of the army and the withdrawal of the Duke 01 
York to Holland at the King's command failed to restore public 
confidence. At the bottom of the panic lay the dread of a Catholic 
successor to the throne, a dread which the after history of Janies fully 
justified. Shaftesbury was earnest for the exclusion of James, but as 
yet the majority of the Council shrank from the step, and supported 
a plan which Charles brought forward for restraining the powers of 
his successor. By this project the presentation to Church livings was 
to be taken out of the new monarch's hands. The last Parliament of the 
preceding reign was to continue to sit ; and the appointment of all 
Councillors, Judges, Lord-Lieutenants, and officers in the fleet, was 
vested in the two Houses so long as a Catholic sovereign was on the 
throne. The extent of these provisions showed the pressure which 
Charles felt, but Shaftesbury was undoubtedly right in setting the plan 
aside as at once insufficient and impracticable. He continued to advo- 
cate the Exclusion in the Royal Council ; and a bill for depriving James 
of his right to the Crown, and for devolving it on the next Protes- 
tant in the line of succession was introduced into the Commons by 
his adherents and passed the House by a large majority. It was 
known that Charles would use his influence with the Peers for its 
rejection. The Earl therefore fell back on the tactics of Pym. A bcld 
Remonstrance was prepared in the Commons. The City of London 
was ready with an address to the two Houses in favour of the bill. 
All Charles could do was to gain time by the prorogation of the 
Parliament for a few months. 

But delay would have been useless had the Country party remained 
at one. The temper of the nation and of the House of Commons 
was so hotly pronounced in favour of the Exclusion of the Duke 
that union among the patriot ministers must in the end have secured 
it and spared England the necessity for the Revolution of 1688. 
The wiser leaders among them, indeed, were already leaning to the 
very change which that Revolution brought about. If James were 
passed over, his daughter Mary, the wife of the Prince of Orange, 
stood next in the order of succession ; and the plan of Temple, Essex, 
and Halifax was to bring the Prince over to England during the 
prorogation, to introduce him into the Council, and to pave his way to 
the throne. Unhappily Shaftesbury was contemplating a very different 
course. For reasons which still remain obscure, he distrusted the 
Prince of Orange. His desire for a more radical change may have 
been prompted ^by the maxin ascribed to him that j" a bad title makes 
a good king.'' \ But whatever were his motives, he had resolved 
to set aside the claim of both James and his children, and to 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



641 



place the Duke of Monmouth on the throne. Monmouth was the 
eldest of the King's bastards, a weak and worthless profligate in 
temper, but popular through his personal beauty and his reputation for 
brUvery. He had just returned in triumph from suppressing a revolt 
which had broken out among the Scotch Covenanters in the western 
shires ; and the tale was at once set about of a secret marriage 
between the King and his mother which v/ould have made him lawful 
heir to the throne. Shaftesbury almost openly espoused his cause. 
He pressed the King to give him the command of the Guards, which 
would have put the only military force in Monmouth's hands. Left 
all alone in this course by the opposition of his colleagues, the Earl 
threw himiself more and more on the support of the Plot. The prose- 
cution of its victims was pushed recklessly on. Three Catholics were 
hanged in London, Eight priests were put to death in the country. 
Pursuivants and informers spread terror through every Popish house- 
hold. Shaftesbury counted on the reassembling of the Parliament to 
bring all this terror to bear upon the King. But Charles had already 
seized on the breach which the Earl's policy had made in the ranks of 
the Country party. He saw that Shaftesbury was unsupported by any 
of his colleagues save Russell. To Temple, Essex, or Halifax it 
seemed possible to bring about the succession of Mary without any 
violent revolution ; but to set aside, not only the right of James, but 
the right of his Protestant children, was to ensure a civil war. The 
influence, however, of Shaftesbury over the Commons promised a 
speedy recognition of Monmouth, and Temple could only meet this by 
advising Charles to dissolve the Parliament. 

Shaftesbury's anger vented itself in threats that the advisers of this 
dissolution should pay for it with their heads. The danger was brought 
home to them by a sudden illness of the King ; and the prospect of 
ruin if Monmouth should succeed in his design drew the moderate 
party in the Council, whether they would or no, to the Duke of York. 
It was the alarm which Essex and HaHfax felt at the threats of 
Shaftesbur}^ which made them advise the recall of James on the 
King's illness ; and though the Duke again withdrew to Edinburgh on 
his brother's recovery, the same ministers encouraged Charles to send 
Monmouth out of the country and to dismiss Shaftesbury himself from 
the Council. The dismissal was the signal for a struggle to Avhose 
danger Charles was far from blinding himself. What had saved him 
till now was his cynical courage. In the midst of the terror and panic 
of the Plot men "wondered to see him quite cheerful amidst such an 
intricacy of troubles," says the courtly Reresby, " but it was not in his 
nature to think or perplex him.self much about anything." Even in 
the heat of the tumult which followed on Shaftesbury's dismissal, 
Charles was seen fishing and sauntering as usual in Windsor Park, j 
But closer observers than Reresby saw beneath this veil of indolent J 

T T 



Sec. V. 
Shafth*;- 

BURY. 

1679- 
1632. 



Shaftes- 
bury s 
Dis- 
missal. 



642 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. 

Shaftes- 
bury. 

ie79- 

1682. 



Peti- 
tioners 
and Ab- 
korrers. 



unconcern a consciousness of new danger. *^ From this time/' says 
Burnet, '^ his temper was observed to change very visibly." He became 
in fact ^^ sullen and thoughtful ; he saw that he had to do with a strange 
sort of people, that could neither be managed nor frightened." But 
he faced the danger with his old unscrupulous coolness. He reopened 
secret negotiations with France. Lewis was as alarmed as Charles him- 
sp^^ he warlike temper of the nation, and as anxious to prevent the 
iisseiui'' / of a Parliament ; but the terms on which he offered a subsidy 
humiliating even for the King's acceptance. vThe failure 

,' m to summon a new Parliament; and the terror, which 

onaftesbury was busily feeding with new tales of massacre and inva- 
sion, returned members even more violent than the members of the 
House he had just dismissed. Even the Council shrank from the 
King's proposal to ^^giftgue this Parliament at its first meeting in 
1680, but Charles persisted. Alone as he stood, he was firm in his 
resolve to gain time, for Time, as he saw, was working in his favour. 
The tide of public sympathy was beginning to turn. The perjury of 
Gates proved too much at last for the credulity of juries ; and the 
acquittal of four of his victims was a sign that the panic was beginning 
to ebb. A far stronger proof of this was seen in the immense efforts 
which Shaftesbury made to maintain it. Fresh informers were 
brought forward to swear to a plot for the assassination of the Earl 
himself, and to the share of the Duke of York in the conspiracies 
of his fellow Papists. A paper found in a meal-tub was produced as 
evidence of the new danger. Gigantic torch-light processions paraded 
the streets of London, and the effigy of the Pope was burnt amidst 
the wild outcry of a vast multitude. 

Acts of yet greater daring showed the lengths to which Shaftesbury 
was now ready to go. He had grown up amidst the tumults of civil 
war, and, greyheaded as he was, the lire and vehemence of his early 
days seemed to wake again in the singular recklessness with which he 
drove on the nation to a new struggle in arms. In 1680 he formed a 
committee for promoting agitation throughout the country ; and the 
petitions v/hich it drew up for the assembly of the Parliament were 
sent to every town and grand jury, and sent back again with thousands 
of signatures. Monmouth, in spite of the King's orders, returned at 
Shaftesbury's call to London ; and a daring pamphlet pointed him out 
as the nation's leader in the coming struggle against Popery and 
tyranny. So great was the alarm of the Council that the garrison in 
every fortress was held in readiness for instant war. But the danger 
was really over. The tide of opinion had fairly turned. Acquittal 
followed acquittal. A reaction of horror and remorse at the cruelty 
which had hurried victim after victim to the gallows succeeded to ths 
pitiless frenzy which Shaftesbury had fanned into a flame. Anxious 

as the nation was for a Protestant sovereign, its sense of justice revolted 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



643 



against the wrong threatened to James' Protestant children; and every 
gentleman in the realm felt insulted at the project of setting Mary 
aside to put the crown of England on the head of a Royal bastard. 
The memory too of the Civil War was still fresh and keen, and the 
rumour of an outbreak of revolt rallied every loyalist round the 
King. The host of petitions which Shaftesbury procured from the 
counties was answered by a counter host of address ' --^^ thou- 
sands who declared their "abhorrence" of the pla ,^ 
Crown. The country was divided into two gre actions •' 
"petitioners" and " abhorrers," the germs of the two grtcv. . ;ii:'ec 
" Whigs " and " Tories " which have played so prominent a part m v^.. 
political history from the time of the Exclusion Bill. Charles at once 
took advantage of this turn of affairs. He recalled the Duke of York 
to the Court. He received the resignations of Russell and Cavendish, 
who alone in the Council still supported Shaftesbur/s projects, "with 
all his heart." Shaftesbury met defiance with defiance. Followed by 
a crowd of his adherents he attended before the Grand Jury of Middle- 
sex, to present the Duke of York as a Catholic recusant, and the King's 
mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, as a national nuisance, while 
Monmouth returned to make a progress through the country, and won 
favour everywhere by his winning demeanour. Above all, Shaftesbury 
relied on the temper of the Commons, elected as they had been in the 
very heat of the panic and irritated by the long prorogation ; and 
the first act of the House on meeting in October was to vote that 
their care should be " to suppress Popery and prevent a Popish 
successor." Rumours of a Catholic plot in Ireland were hardly 
needed to push the Exclusion Bill through the Commons without a 
division; a.nd even the Council wavered before the resolute temper of 
their opponents. Temple and Essex both declared themselves in 
favour of the Exclusion. Of all the leaders of the Country party, only 
Lord Halifax now remained opposed to it, and his opposition simply 
aimed at securing its object by less violent means. " My Lord 
Halifax is entirely in the interest of the Prince of Orange," the 
French ambassador, Barillon, wrote to his master, "and what he seems 
to be doing for the Duke of York is really in order to make an open- 
ing for a compromise by which the Prince of Orange may benefit." 
But Charles eagerly seized on this fatal disunion in the only party 
which could effectively check his designs. He dismissed Essex and 
Temple and backed by his personal influence the eloquence of Halifax 
in bringing about the rejection of the Exclusion Bill in the Lords. 
The same fate awaited Shaftesbury's despairing efforts to pass a Bill 
of Divorce, which would have enabled Charles to put away his queen 
on the ground of barrenness, and by a fresh marriage to give a 
Protestant heir to the throne. 

Bold as the King's action had been, it rested for support simply on 

T T 2 



644 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. V. I the change in pubHc feehng, and this Shaftesbury resolved to check 
and turn by a great public impeachment which would revive and esta- 
blish the general belief in the Pl©t. Lord Stafford, who from his age 
and rank was looked on as the leader of the Catholic party, had 
lain a prisoner in the Tower since the first outburst of popular frenzy* 
He was now solemnly impeached ; and his trial in December 1680 
mustered the whole force of informers to prove the truth of a Catholic 
conspiracy against the King and the realm. The evidence was worth- 
less ; but the trial revived, as Shaftesbury had hoped, much of the old 
panic, and the condemnation of the prisoner by a majority of his peers 
was followed by his death on the scaffold. The blow produced its 
effect on all but Charles. Even Lord Sunderland, the ablest of the 
new ministers who had succeeded Temple and his friends, pressed the 
King to give way. Halifax, while still firm against the Exclusion Bill, 
took advantage of the popular pressure to introduce a measure which 
would with less show of violence have as completely accomplished 
the ends of an exclusion as the bill itself, a m^easure which would have 
taken from James on his accession the right of veto on any bill passed 
by the two Houses, the right of negotiating with foreign states, or of 
appointing either civil or military officers save with the consent of 
Parliament. The plan was no doubt prompted by the Priace of 
Orange ; and the States of Holland supported it by pressing Charles to 
come to an accommodation with his subjects which would enable them 
to check the perpetual aggressions which France had been making on 
her neighbours since the Peace of Nimeguen. But deserted as he wks 
by his ministers, and even by his mistress, for the Duchess of Ports- 
mouth had been cowed into supporting the exclusion by the threats of 
Shaftesbury, Charles was determined to resist every project whether of 
exclusion or limitation. On a refusal of supplies he dissolved the 
Parhament. The truth was that he had at last succeeded in procuring 
the aid of France. Without the knowledge of his ministers he had 
renewed his secret negotiations, had pledged himself to withdraw from 
aUiance with all the opponents of French policy, and in return had 
been promised a subsidy which recruited his Treasury and again ren- 
dered him independent of Parhaments. With characteristic subtilty 
however he summoned, in March 1681, a new Parhament. The sum- 
mons was a mere blind. The King's one aim was to frighten the 
country into reaction by the dread of civil strife ; and his summons of 
the Parliament to Oxford was an appeal to the country against the dis- 
loyalty of the capital, and an adroit means of reviving the memories , 
of the Civil War. With the same end he ordered his guards to ac- \ 
company him, on the pretext of anticipated disorder ; and Shaftesbury, I 
himself terrified at the projects of the Court, aided the King's designs 
by appearing with his followers in arms on the plea of self-protection. 
The violence of the Parhament played yet more effectually into the , 



IX.] 



TJ'JE REVOLUTION. 



645 



King's hands. Its members were the same as those who had been 
returned to the Parhament he had just dissolved, and their temper was 
more vehement than ever. Their rejection of a new Limitation Bill 
brought forward by Halifax, which while conceding to James the title 
of King w^ould have vested the actual functions of government in the 
Prince of Orange, alienated the more moderate and sensible of the 
Country party. Their attempt to revive the panic by impeaching an 
informer, Fitz Harris, before the House of Lords in defiance of the 
constitutional rule which entitled him as a commoner to a trial by his 
peers in the course of common law, did still more to throw public 
opinion on the side of the Crown. Shaftesbury's course rested wholly 
on the belief that the penury of the Treasury left Charles at his mercy, 
and that a refusal of supplies must wring from the King his assent to 
the exclusion. But the gold of France had freed the King from his 
thraldom. He had used the Parliament simply to exhibit himself as a 
sovereign whose patience and conciliatory temper was rewarded with 
insult and violence ; and now that he saw his end accomplished, he 
suddenly dissolved the Houses in April, and appealed in a Royal 
declaration to the justice of the nation at large. 

The appeal was met by an almost universal burst of loyalty. The 
Church rallied to the King; his declaration was read from every 
pulpit; and the Universities solemnly decided that " no religion, no law, 
no fault, no forfeiture," could avail to bar the sacred right of hereditary 
succession. The arrest of Shaftesbury on a charge of suborning false 
witnesses to the Plot marked the new strength of the Crown. London 
indeed was still true to him ; the Middlesex Grand Jury ignored the 
bill of his indictment ; and his discharge from the Tower was wel- 
comed in every street with bonfires and ringing of bells. But a fresh 
impulse was given to the loyal enthusiasm of the country at large by 
the publication of a plan found among his papers, the plan of a 
secret association for the furtherance of the exclusion, w^hose members 
bound themselves to obey the orders of Parliament even after its pro- 
rogation or dissolution by the Crown. Charles pushed boldly on in 
his new course. He confirmed the loyalty of the Church by renewing 
the persecution of the Nonconformists. The Duke of York returned 
in triumph to St. James's, and the turn of the tide was so manifest that 
Lord Sunderland and the ministers, who had wavered till now, openly 
sought the Duke's favour. Monmouth, who had resumed his progresses 
through the country as a means of checking the tide of reaction, was 
at once arrested. A daring breach of custom placed Tories in 16S2 
i as sheriffs of the City of London, and the packed juries they nomi- 
i nated left the life of every exclusionist at the mercy of the Crown. 
\ Shaftesbury, alive to the new danger, plunged desperately into con- 
1 spiracles with a handful of adventurers as despera.te as himself, hid 
i himself in the City, where he boasted that ten thousand " brisk boys ^' 



Sec. V. 



646 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The 
Second 
Stuart 
Tyranny. J 
1682- f 
I6S3. \ 

I 



were ready to appear at his call, and urged his friends to rise in arms. 
But their delays drove him to flight ; and in January 1683, two months 
after his arrival in Holland, the soul of the great leader, great from 
his immense energy and the wonderful versatility of his genius, but 
whose genius and energy had ended in wrecking for the time the 
fortunes of English freedom and in associating the noblest of causes 
with the vilest of crimes, found its first quiet in death. 



ion VI.— The Second Stuart Tirranny, 1682—1688. 

• luoHties. — To those for the previous sections we may add Welwood's 
Memoirs," Luttrell's " Diary,'' and above all Lord Macaulay's " History of 1 
England," during this period.] 



The flight of Shaftesbury proclaimed the triumph of the King. His 
wonderful sagacity had told him when the struggle was over and 
further resistance useless. But the Whig leaders, who had delayed to 
answer the Earl's call, still nursed projects of rising in arms ; and 
the more desperate spirits who had clustered round him as he lay 
hidden in the City took refuge in plots of assassination and in a plan 
for murdering Charles and his brother as they passed the Rye-house 
on their road from London to Newmarket. Both the conspiracies 
were betrayed, and though they were wholly distinct from one another the 
cruel ingenuity of the Crown lawyers blended them into one. Lord 
Essex, the last of an ill-fated race, saved himself from a traitor's death 
by suicide in the Tower. Lord Russell, convicted on a chaige of sharing 
in the Rye-house plot, was beheaded in Lincoln Inn Fields. The 
same fate awaited Algernon Sidney. Monmouth fled in terror over 
sea, and his flight was followed by a series of prosecutions for sedition 
directed against his followers. In 1683 the Constitutional opposition 
which had held Charles so long in check lay crushed at his feet. A 
weaker man might easily have been led into a wild tyranny by the 
mad outburst of loyalty which greeted his triumph. On the very day 
when the crowd around Russell's scaffold were dipping their hand- 
kerchiefs in his blood, as in the blood of a martyr, the University 
of Oxford solemnly declared that the doctrine of passive obedience, 
even to the worst of rulers, was a part of religion. But Charles 
saw that immense obstacles still lay in the road of a mere tyranny. 
The Church was as powerful as ever, and the mention of a renewal 
of the Indulgence to Nonconformists had to be withdrawn before 
the opposition of the bishops. He was careful therefore during the 
few years which remained to him to avoid the appearance of any open 
violation of public law. He suspended no statute. He imposed no 
tax by Royal authority. He generally enforced the Test Act. Nothing 
indeed shows more completely how great a work the Long Parliament 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



647 



had done than a survey of the reign of Charles the Second. ^^ The 
King," Hallam says very truly, " was restored to nothing but what the 
law had preserved to him." No attempt was made to restore the 
abuses which the patriots of 1641 had swept away. Parliament was 
continually summoned. In spite of its frequent refusal of supphes, no 
attempt was ever made to raise money by unconstitutional means. 
The few illegal proclamations issued under Clarendon ceased with his 
fall. No effort was made to revive the Star Chamber and the Court of 
High Commission ; and if judges were servile and juries sometimes 
packed, there was no open interference with the course of justice. In 
two remarkable points freedom had made an advance " '^n 1641. 
From the moment when printing began to tell on public ...^i., ^^ .. ^ 
been gagged by a system of hcences. The regulation amed ur 
Henry the Eighth subjected the press to the contiux c^' "^^^^ ' 
Chamber, and the Martin Marprelate libels brought about a yet moiv, 
stringent control under Elizabeth. Even the Long Parliament laid a 
heavy hand on the press, and the great remonstrance of Milton in his 
" Areopagitica " fell dead on the ears of his Puritan associates. But the 
statute for the regulation of printing which was passed immediately 
after the Restoration expired finally in 1679, ^^^ the temper of the 
Parliament gave no hope of any successful attempt to re-establish the 
censorship. To the freedom of the press the Habeas Corpus Act 
added a new security for the personal freedom of every Englishman. 
Against arbitrary imprisonment provision had been made in the 
earliest ages by a famous clause in the Great Charter. No free man 
could be held in prison save on charge or conviction of crime or for 
debt ; and every prisoner on a criminal charge could demand as a 
right from the court of King's Bench the issue of a writ of " habeas 
corpus," which bound his gaoler to produce both the prisoner and the 
warrant on which he was imprisoned, that the court might judge 
whether he was imprisoned according to law. In cases however of 
imprisonment on a warrant of the Royal Council it had been some- 
times held by judges that the writ could not be issued, and under 
Clarendon's administration instances had in this way occurred of im- 
prisonment without legal remedy. But his fall was quickly followed by 
the introduction of a bill to secure this right of the subject, and after 
a long struggle the Act which is known as the Habeas Corpus Act 
passed finally in 1679. By this great statute the old practice of the 
law was freed from all difficulties and exceptions. Every prisoner 
committed for any crime save treason or felony was declared entitled 
to his writ even in the vacations of the courts, and heavy penalties 
were enforced on judges or gaolers who refused him this right. 
Every person committed for felony or treason was entitled to be 
released on bail, unless indicted at the next session of gaol delivery 
after his commitment, and to be discharged if not indicted at the 



648 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



sessions which followed. It was forbidden under the heaviest penalties 
to send a prisoner into any places or fortresses beyond the seas. 

Galling to the Crown as the freedom of the press and the Habeas 
Corpus Act were soon found to be, Charles made no attempt to 
curtail the one or to infringe the other. But while cautious to avoid 
rousing popular resistance, he moved coolly and resolutely forward on 
the path of despotism. It was in vain that Halifax pressed for 
energetic resistance to the aggressions of France, far the recall of 
Monmouth, or for the calling of a fresh Parliament. Like every other 
English statesman he found he had been duped, and that now his 
work was done he was suffered to remain in office but left without 
any influence in the government. In spite of his remonstrances the 
Test Act was violated by the readmission of James to a seat in the 
Council, and by his restoration to the office of Lord High Admiral. 
Parliament, in defiance of the Triennial Act, remained unassembled 
during the remainder of the King's reign. His secret alliance with * 
France furnished Charles with the funds he immediately required, and 
the rapid growth of the customs through the increase of English com- 
merce promised to give him a revenue which, if peace were preserved, 
would save him from the need of a fresh appeal to the Commons. All 
opposition was at an end. The strength of the Country party had 
been broken by the reaction against Shaftesbury's projects, and by the 
flight and death of its more prominent leaders. Whatever strength it 
retained lay chiefly in the towns, and these were now attacked by 
writs of " quo warranto," which called on them to show cause why 
their charters should not be declared forfeited on the ground of abuse of 
their privileges. A few verdicts on the side of the Crown brought about 
a general surrender of municipal liberties ; and the grant of fresh 
charters, in which all but ultra-loyalists were carefully excluded from 
their corporations, placed the representation of the boroughs in 
the hands of the Crown. Against active discontent Charles had long 
been quietly providing by the gradual increase of his Guards. The 
withdrawal of its garrison from Tangier enabled him to raise their 
force to nine thousand well-equipped soldiers, and to supplement this 
force, the nucleus of our present standing army, by a reserve of six 
regiments, which were maintained, till they should be needed at home, 
in the service of the United Provinces. But great as the danger 
really was, it lay not so much in isolated acts of tyranny as in the 
character and purpose of Charles himself. His death at the very 
moment of his triumph saved English freedom. He had regained his 
old popularity, and at the new^s of his danger in the spring of 1685 
crowds thronged the churches, praying that God would raise him up ' 
again to be a father to his people. The bishops around his bed fell on 
their knees and implored his blessing, and Charles with outstretched 
hands solemnly gave it to them. But while his subjects were praying, 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



649 



and his bishops seeking a blessing, the one anxiety of the King was to 
die reconciled to the Catholic Church. When his chamber was cleared 
a priest named Huddleston; who had saved his life after the battle 
of Worcester, received his- confession and administered the last sacra- 
ments. Charles died as he had lived : brave, witty, cynical, even 
in the presence of death. Tortured as he was with pain, he begged 
the bystanders to forgive him for being so unconscionable a time in 
dying. One mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, hung weeping over 
his bed. His last thought was of another m.istress, Nell Gwynn. '' Do 
not," he whispered to his- successor ere he s-ank into a fatal stupor, ''do 
not let poor Nelly starve ! " 

The first words of James on his accession in February 1685 were 
a pledge to preserve the laws inviolate, and to protect the Church, j 
The pledge was welcomed by the whole country with enthusiasm. All 
the suspicions of a Catholic sovereign seemed to have disappeared. 
" We have the word of a King ! '^ ran th€ general cry, " and of a King 
who was never worse than his word.'^ The conviction of his brother^s 
faithlessness stood James in good stead-. He was looked upon as nar- 
row, impetnous, stubborn, and despotic in heart, but even his enemies 
did not accuse him of being false. Above all he was believed to be 
keenly alive to the honour of his country, and resolute to fre^ it from 
foreign dependence. It was necessary to summon a Parliament, for 
the Royal revenue ceased with the death of the King ; but the elections, 
swayed at once by the tide of loyalty and by the command of the 
boroughs which the surrender of their charters had given to the 
Crown, sent up a House of Commons in which James failed to fmd 
aman who'was not to his mind. The question of religious security 
was waived at a hint of the Royal displeasure. A revenue of nearly 
two millions was granted to the King for life. All that was wanted 
to rouse the loyalty of the country into fanaticism was supplied by a 
rebellion in the north, and by another under Monmouth in the west. 
The hopes of Scotch freedom had clung ever since the Restoration to 
the house of Argyle. The great Marquis,, as we have seen, had 
been brought to the block at the Restoration. His son, the Earl of 
Argyle, had been unable to save himself even by a life of singular 
caution and obedience from the ill-will of the vile politicians vv'ho 
governed Scotland. He was at last convicted of treason on grounds 
at which eveiy English statesman stood aghast. '' We should not 
hang a dog here," Halifax- protested, " on the grounds on which my 
lord Argyle has been sentenced to death." The Earl escaped however 
to Holland, and lived peaceably there during the six last years of 
the reign of Charles. Monmouth found the same refuge at the 
Hague, where a belief in his fathei-^s love and purpose to recall him 
secured him a kindly reception from ^Villiam of Orange. But the 
accession of Janies was a death -blovs' to the hopes of the Duke, while 



650 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. I it Stirred the fanaticism of Argyle to a resolve of wresting Scotland from 
the rule of a Popish king. The two leaders determined to appear in arms 
In England and the North, and the two expeditions sailed within a few 
days of each other. Argyle's attempt was soon over. His clan of the 
Campbells rose on his landing in Cantyre, but the country had been 
occupied for the King, and quarrels among the exiles who accom- 
panied him robbed his effort of every chance of success. His force 
scattered without a fight ; and Argyle, arrested in an attempt to 
escape, was hurried to a traitor's death. Monmouth for a time found 
brighter fortune. His popularity in the west was great, and though the 
gentry held aloof when he landed at Lyme, the farmers and traders 
of Devonshire and Dorset flocked to his standard. The clothier-towns 
of Somerset were still true to the Whig cause, and on the entrance 
of the Duke into Taunton the popular enthusiasm showed itself in 
flowers which wreathed every door, as well as in a train of young 
girls who presented Monmouth with a Bible and a flag. His forces 
now amounted to six thousand men, but whatever chance of success 
he might have had was lost by his assumption of the title of King. 
The gentry, still true to the cause of Mary and of William, held stub- 
bornly aloof, while the Guards hurried to the scene of the revolt, and 
the militia gathered to the Royal standard. Foiled in an attempt on 
Bristol and Bath, Monmouth fell back on Bridge water, and flung 
him.self in the night of the sixth of July, 1685, on the King's forces, 
whicii lay encamped on Sedgemoor. The surprise failed ; and the 
brave peasants and miners who followed the Duke, checked in their 
advance by a deep drain which crossed the moor, were broken after a 
short resistance by the Royal horse. Their leader fled from the field, 
and after a vain effort to escape from the realm, was captured and 
sent pitilessly to the block. 

Never had England shown a firmer loyalty; but its loyalty was 
changed into horror by the terrible measures of repression which fol- 
lowed on the victory of Sedgemoor. Even North, the Lord Keeper, a 
servile tool of the Crown, protested against the license and bloodshed 
in which the troops were suffered to indulge after the battle. His pro- 
test however was disregarded, and he withdrew broken-hearted from 
the Court to die. James was, in fact, resolved on a far more terrible 
vengeance ; and the Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural 
powers but of violent temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of 
judicial murders which have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three 
hundred and fifty rebels were hanged in the " Bloody Circuit,'' as 
Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than 
eight hundred were sold into slavery beyond sea. A yet larger 
number were whipped and imprisoned. The Queen, the maids of 
honour, the courtiers, even the Judge himself, made shameless profit 
from the sale of pardons. What roused pity above all were the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



651 



cruelties wreaked upon women. Some were scourged from market- 
town to market-town. Mrs. Lisle, the wife of one of the Regicides, 
was sent to the block at Winchester for harbouring a rebel. Elizabeth 
Gaunt, for the same act of womanly charity, was burned at Tyburn. 
Pity turned into horror when it was found that cruelty such as this was 
avowed and sanctioned by the King. Even the cold heart of General 
Churchill, to whose energy the victory at Sedgemoor had mainly been 
owing, revolted at the ruthlessness with which James turned away 
from all appeals for mercy. " This marble," he cried as he struck the 
chimney-piece on which he leant, " is not harder than the King's 
heart." But it was soon plain that the terror which the butchery was 
meant to strike into the people was part of a larger purpose. The 
revolt was made a pretext for a vast increase of the standing army. 
Charles, as we have seen, had silently and cautiously raised it to 
nearly ten thousand men ; James raised it at one swoop to twenty 
'thousand. The employment of this force was to be at home, not 
abroad, for the hope of an English policy in foreign affairs had already 
faded away. In the design which James had at heart he could look 
,for no consent from Parliament; and however his pride revolted against 
a dependence on France, it was only by French gold and French 
soldiers that he could hope to hold the Parliament permanently at 
bay. A week therefore after his accession he assured Lewis that 
his gratitude and devotion to him equalled that of Charles himself. 
^" Tell your master," he said to the French ambassador, " that without 
his protection I can do nothing. He has a right to be consulted, 
and it is my wish to consult him, about everything." The pledge of 
subservience was rewarded with the promise of a subsidy, and the 
■; promise was received with expressions of delight and servility which 
Charles would have mocked at. 

j Never had the secret league with France seemed so full of danger 
to English rehgion. Europe had long been trembling at the ambition 
,|of Lewis; it was trembling now at his bigotry. He had proclaimed 
] warfare against civil liberty in his attack upon Holland ; he declared 
war at this moment upon religious freedom by revoking the Edict of 
' Nantes, the measure by which Henry the Fourth, after his abandon- 
3ment of Protestantism, secured toleration and the free exercise of 
\ their worship for his Protestant subjects. It had been respected 
j by Richeheu even in his victory over the Huguenots, and only 
' lightly tampered with by Mazarin. But from the beginning of his 
\ reign Lewis had resolved to set aside its provisions, and his revoca- 
tion of it in 1685 was only the natural close of a progressive system 
of persecution. The Revocation was followed by outrages more cruel 
than even the bloodshed of Alva. Dragoons were quartered on 
Protestant families, women were flung from their sick-beds into the 
'' streets, children were torn from their mothers' arms to be brought up 



652 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



in Catholicism, ministers were sent to the galleys. In spite of the 
royal edicts, which forbade even flight to the victims of these horrible 
atrocities, a hundred thousand Protestants fled over the borders, 
and Holland, Switzerland, the Palatinate, were filled with French 
exiles. Thousands found refuge in England, and their industry 
founded in the fields east of London the silk trade of Spitalfields. 
But while Englishmen were quivering with horror at the news from 
France, James in defiance of the law was filling his new army with 
Catholic officers. He dismissed Flalifax on his refusal to consent to 
a plan for repealing the Test Act, and met the Parliament in 1686 
with a haughty declaration that whether legal or no his grant of 
commissions to- Catholics must not be questioned, and a demand 
of supplies for his new troops. Loyal as was the temper of the 
Houses, their alarm at Popery and at a standing army was yet 
stronger than their loyalty. The Commons by the majority of a single 
vote deferred the grant of supplies till grievances were redressed, 
and demanded in their address the recall of the illegal commissions. 
The Lords took a bolder tone ; and the protest of the bishops against 
any infringement of the Test Act was backed by the eloquence ot 
Halifax. But botb Houses were at once prorogued. The King 
resolved to obtain from the judges what he could not obtain from 
Parhament. He remodelled the bench by dismissing four judges who 
refused to lend themselves to his plans ; and their successors decided 
in the case of Sir Edward Hales, a Catholic officer in the Royal 
army, that a-^ Royal dispensation could be pleaded in bar of the Test 
Act. The principle laid down by the judges asserted the right of 
th€ Crown to override the laws ; and it was applied by James with 
a reckless impatience of all decency and self-restraint. Catholics 
were admitted into civil and military offices without stint, and four 
Roman Catholic peers were sworn as members of the Privy Council. 
The laws which forbade the presence of Catholic priests in the realm 
or the open exercise of Catholic worship were set at nought. A 
gorgeous chapel was opened in the Palace of St. James for the worship 
of the King. Carmelites, Benedictines, Franciscans, appeared in 
their religious garb in the streets of London, and the Jesuits set up a , 
crowded school in the Savoy. 

The quick growth of discontent at these acts Vv^ould have startled a 
wiser man into prudence, but James prided himself on the reckless 
violence of his procedure. A riot which took place on the opening of i 
a fresh Catholic chapel in the City was followed by the estabhshment ; 
of a camp of thirteen thousand men at Hounslow to overawe the capital. 
The course which James intended to follow in England was shown by 
the course he was following in the sister kingdoms. In Scotland he 
acted as a pure despot. He placed its government in the hands of two 
lords, Meliort and Perth, who had embraced his own religion, and put 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



653 



a Catholic in command of the Castle of Edinburgh. Under Charles the 
Scotch Parliament had been the mere creature of the Crown, but 
servile as were its members, there was a point at which their servility 
stopped. When James boldly required from them the toleration of 
Catholics, they refused to pass such an Act. It was in vain that the 
King tempted them to consent by the offer of a free trade with Eng- 
land. " Shall we sell our God?" was the indignant reply. James at once 
ordered the Scotch judges to treat all laws against Catholics as null and 
'void, and his orders were obeyed. In Ireland his policy threw off even 
'the disguise of law. Papists were admitted by the King's command to 
)the Council and to civil offices. A Catholic, Lord Tyrconnell, was put 
at the head of the army, and set instantly about its re-organization by 
cashiering Protestant officers and by admitting two thousand Catholic 
•'natives into its ranks. Meanwhile James had begun in England a 
'bold and systematic attack upon the Church. He regarded his ecclesi- 
'astical supremacy as a weapon providentially left to him for undoing 
<the work which it had enabled his predecessors to do. Under Henry 
and Elizabeth it had been used to turn the Church of England from 
'jCatholic to Protestant. Under James it should be used to turn it back 
^again from Protestant to Catholic. The High Commission indeed 
jhad been declared illegal by an Act of the Long Parliament, and this 
Act had been confirmed by the Parliament of the Restoration, But 
(the statute was roughly set aside. Seven Commissioners were ap- 
pointed in 1686 for the government of the Church, with Jeffreys at 
^their head ; and the first blow of the Commission was at the Bishop 
^of London. James had forbidden the clergy to preach against Popery, 
'and ordered Bishop Compton to suspend a London vicar who set this 
^' order at defiance. The Bishop's refusal was punished by his own 
^suspension. But the pressure of the Commission only drove the clergy 
''to a bolder defiance of the Royal will. Sermons against superstition 
J were preached from every pulpit ; and the^wo most famous divines of 
*the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put themselves at the head of a 
\ host of controversialists who scattered pamphlets and tracts from every 
sprinting press. :/ 

'I Foiled in his direct efforts to overawe the Church, James resolved to 

\ attack it in the great institutions which had till now been its stronghold. 

To secure the Universities for Catholicism was to seize the only 

•; training schools which the clergy possessed. Cambridge indeed escaped 

easily. A Benedictine monk who presented himself with Royal letters 

recommending him for the degree of a master of arts was rejected on 

j{ his refusal to sign the Articles : and the Vice-Chancellor paid for the 

'i rejection by dismissal from his office. But a far more violent and 

obstinate attack was directed against Oxford. The Master of Univer- 

^1 sity College, who declared himself a convert, was authorized to retain 

^ his post in defiance of the law. Massey, a Roman Cathohc, was 



654 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Srcond 
Stuart 
Tyranny. 
1682- 
16B8. 



Decla- 
ration of 
Indul- 
irence. 



X687. 



presented by the Crown to the Deanery of Christ Church. Magdalen 
was the wealthiest Oxford College, and James in 1687 recommended 
one Farmer, a Catholic of infamous life and not even qualified by 
statute for the office, to its vacant headship. The Fellows remon- 
strated, and on the rejection of their remonstrance chose Hough, one 
of their own number, as their President. The Commission declared 
the election void ; and James, shamed out of his first candidate, re- 
commended a second, Parker, Bishop of Oxford, a Catholic in heart and 
the meanest of his courtiers. But the Fellows held stubbornly to their 
legal head. It was in vain that the King visited Oxford, summoned 
them to his presence, and rated them as they knelt before him like 
schoolboys. " I am King," he said, " I will be obeyed ! Go to your 
chapel this instant, and elect the Bishop ! Let those who refuse look 
to it, for they shall feel the whole weight of my hand ! " It was felt 
that to give Magdalen as well as Christ Church into Catholic hands 
was to turn Oxford into a Catholic seminary, and the King's threats 
were calmly disregarded. But they were soon carried out. A special 
Commission visited the University, pronounced Hough an intruder, set 
aside his appeal to the law, burst open the door of his President's 
house to install Parker in his place, and on their refusal to submit de- 
prived the Fellows of their fellowships. The expulsion of the Fellows 
was followed on a like refusal by that of the Demies. Parker, who 
died immediately after his installation, was succeeded by a Roman 
Catholic bishop in partibus, Bonaventure Giffard, and twelve Catho- 
lics were admitted to fellowships in a single day. 

The work James was doing in the Church he was doing with as 
mad a recklessness in the State. Parliament, Avhich had been kept 
silent by prorogation after prorogation, was finally dissolved ; and the 
King was left without a check in his defiance of the law. It was in 
vain that the bulk of the Catholic gentry stood aloof and predicted 
the inevitable reaction his course must bring about, or that Rome 
itself counselled greater moderation. James was infatuated with the 
success of his enterprises. He resolved to show the w^orld that even 
the closest ties of blood were as nothing to him if they conflicted 
with the demands of his faith. His marriage with Anne Hyde, the 
daughter of Clarendon, bound both the Chancellor's sons to his 
fortunes ; and on his accession he had sent his elder brother-in-law, 
Edward, Earl of Clarendon, as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, and raised 
the younger, Laurence, Earl of Rochester, to the post of Lord Trea- 
surer. But Rochester was now told that the King could not safely 
entrust so great a charge to anyone who did not share his sentiments 
on religion, and on his refusal to abandon his faith he was driven from 
office. His brother. Clarendon, shared his fall. A Catholic, Lord 
Bellasys, became First Lord of the Treasury, which was put into 
commission after Rochester's removal ; and another Catholic, Lord 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



655 



Arundell, became Lord Privy Seal. Petre, a Jesuit, was called to the 
Privy Council. The Nuncio of the Pope was received in state at 
Windsor. But even James could hardly fail to perceive the growth 
of public discontent. The great Tory nobles, if they were staunch 
for the Crown, were as resolute Englishmen in their hatred of mere 
tyranny as the Whigs themselves. James gave the Duke of Norfolk 
ffie sword of State to carry before him as he went to Mass. The 
Duke stopped at the Chapel door. ^' Your father would have gone 
further," said the King. "Your Majesty's father was the better 
man," replied the Duke, " and he would not have gone so fir." The 
young Duke of Somerset was ordered to introduce the Nuncio into 
the Presence Chamber. " I am advised," he answered, " that I can- 
not obey your Majesty without breaking the law." " Do you not 
know that I am above the law.^^' James asked angrily. "Your 
Majesty may be, but I am not," retorted the Duke. He was dis- 
missed from his post ; but the spirit of resistance spread fast. In 
spite of the King's letters, the governors of the Charter House, 
who numbered among them some of the greatest English nobles, 
refused to admit a Catholic to the benefits of the foundation. The 
most devoted loyalists began to murmur when James demanded 
apostasy as a proof of their loyalty. He had soon in fact to abandon 
all hope of bringing the Church or the Tories over to his will. He 
turned, as Charles had turned, to the Nonconformists, and published 
in 1687 a Declaration of Indulgence which annulled the penal laws 
against Nonconformists and Catholics alike, and abrogated every Act 
which imposed a test as a qualification for office in Church or State. 
The temptation to accept such an offer was great, for, since the fall of 
Shaftesbury, persecution had fallen heavily on the Protestant dissidents, 
and we can hardly w^onder that the Nonconformists wavered for a 
time. But the great body of them, and all the more venerable namics 
among them, remained true to the cause of freedom. Baxter, Howe, 
Bunyan, all refused an Indulgence which could only be purchased by 
the violent overthrow of the law. A mere handful of addresses could 
be procured by the utmost pressure, and it was soon plain that the 
attempt to divide the forces of Protestantism had utterly failed. 

The failure of his Declaration only spurred James to an attempt to 
procure a repeal of the Test Act from Parliament itself. But no free 
Parliament could be brought, as he knew, to consent to its repeal. 
The Lords indeed could be swamped by lavish creations of new peers. 
" Your troop of horse," his minister. Lord Sunderland, told Churchill, 
"shall be called up into the House of Lords." But it was a harder 
matter to secure a compliant House of Commons. The Lord Lieute- 
nants were directed to bring about such a " regulation " of the governing 
body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates pledged to 
the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in their county 



656 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



Sec. VI. 

The 
Second 
Stuart 
Tyranny- 
1682- 
1683. 



as to his vote. Half of them at once refused, and a long list of great 
nobles — the Earls of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Dorset, Derby, Pembroke, 
Rutland, Abergavenny, Thanet, Northampton, and Abingdon — were 
at once dismissed from their Lord Lieutenancies. The justices when 
questioned simply repHed that they would vote according to their 
consciences, and send members to Parliament who would protect the 
Protestant rehgion. After repeated " regulations '^ it was found impos- 
sible to form a corporate body which would return representatives 
willing to comply with the Royal will. All thought of a Parliament 
had to be abandoned ; and even the most bigoted courtiers counselled 
moderation at this proof of the stubborn opposition which James 
must prepare to encounter from the peers, the gentry, and the trading 
classes. The clergy alone still hesitated in any open act of resistance. 
Even the tyranny of the Commission and the attack on the Universities 
failed to rouse into open disaffection men who had been preaching 
Sunday after Sunday the doctrine of passive obedience to the worst of 
kings. But James seemed resolved to rouse them. On the twenty- 
seventh of April, 1 688, he issued a fresh Declaration of Indulgence, 
and ordered every clergyman to read it during divine service on two 
successive Sundays. Little time was given for deliberation, but little 
time was needed. The clergy refused almost to a man to be the 
instruments of their own humiliation. The Declaration was read in 
only four of the London churches, and in these the congregation 
flocked out of church at the first words of it. Nearly all of the 
country clergy refused to obey the Royal orders. The Bishops went 
with the rest of the clergy. A few days before the appointed Sun- 
day Archbishop Sancroft called his suffragans together, and the six 
who were able to appear at Lambeth signed a temperate protest to 
the King, in which they declined to publish an illegal Declaration. 
"It is a standard of rebellion," James exclaimed as the Primate pre- 
sented the paper ; and the resistance of the clergy was no sooner 
announced to him than he determined to wreak his vengeance on 
the Prelates who had signed the protest. He ordered the Ecclesi- 
astical Commissioners to deprive them of their sees, but in this 
matter even the Commissioners shrank from obeying him. The 
Chancellor, Lord Jeffreys, advised a prosecution for libel as an easier 
mode of punishment ; and the Bishops, who refused to give bail, were 
committed on this charge to the Tower. They passed to their prison 
amidst the shouts of a great multitude, the sentinels knelt for their 
blessing as they entered its gates, and the soldiers of the garrison 
drank their healths. So threatening was the temper of the nation 
that his ministers pressed James to give way. But his obstinacy grew 
with the danger. " Indulgence," he said, " ruined my father ; " and on 
June the 29th the Bishops appeared as criminals at the bar of the King's 
Bench. The jury had been packed, the judges were mere tools of the 



rx.j 



THE REVOLUTION, 



6-" 



Crown, but judges and jury were alike overawed by the indignation of 
the people at large. No sooner had the foreman of the jury uttered 
the words " Not guilty'* than a roar of applause burst from the crowd, 
and horsemen spurred along every road to carry over the country the 
news of the acquittal. 

Section VII.— Willicym of Orange. 

[Authorities. — As before.] 



Amidst the tumult of the Plot and the Exclusion Bill the w*iser 
among English statesmen had fixed their hopes steadily on the 
succession of Mary, the elder daughter and heiress of James. The 
tyranny of her father^s reign made this succession the hope of the 
people at large. But to Europe the importance of the change, when- 
ever it should come about, lay not so much in the succession of Mary, 
as in the new power which such an event would give to her husband, 
William Prince of Orange. We have come in fact to a moment when 
the struggle of England against the aggression of its King blends with 
the larger struggle of Europe against the aggression of Lewis the 
Fourteenth, and it is only by a rapid glance at the political state of 
the Continent that we can understand the real nature and results of the 
Revolution which drov^e James froin the throne. 

At this moment France was the dominant power in Christendom. 
The religious wars which began with the Reformation broke the 
strength of the nations around her. Spain was no longer able to fight 
the battle of Catholicism. The Peace of Westphaha, by the inde- 
pendence it gave to the German princes and the jealousy it left alive 
between the Protestant and CathoHc powers, destroyed the strength of 
the Empire. The German branch of the House of Austria, spent 
with the long struggle of the Thirty Years' War, had enough to do in 
battling hard against the advance of the Turks from Hungary on 
Vienna. The victories of Gustavus and of the generals whom he 
formed had been dearly purchased by the exhaustion of Sweden. The 
United Provinces were as yet hardly regarded as a great power, and 
were trammelled by their contest with England for the empire of the 
seas. England, which under Cromwell promised for a moment to 
take the lead in Europe, sank under Charles and James into a 
dependency of France. France alone profited by the general wreck. 
The wise policy of Henry the Fourth in securing religious peace by a 
toleration to the Protestants had undone the ill effects of its religious 
wars. The Huguenots were still numerous south of the Loire, but the 
loss of their fortresses had turned their energies into the peaceful 
channels of industry and trade. Feudal disorder was roughly put, 

U U 



658 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



down by Richeliew, and the policy by which he gathered all local 
power into the hands of the crown, though fatal in the end to the real 
welfare of France, gave it for the moment an air of good government 
and a command over its internal resources which no other country^! 
could boast. Its compact and fertile territory, the natural activity and?! 
enterprise of its people, and the rapid growth of its commerce and of' 
manufactures were sources of natural wealth which even its heavy 
taxation failed to check. In the latter half of the seventeenth century 
France was looked upon as the wealthiest power in Europe. The 
yearly income of the French crown was double that of England, and 
even Lewis the Fourteenth trusted as much to the credit of his 
treasury as to the glory of his arms. " After all," he said, when the 
fortunes of war began to turn against him, " it is the last sovereign which 
must win ! " It was in fact this superiority in wealth which enabled 
France to set on foot forces such as had never been seen in Europe 
since the downfall of Rome. At the opening of the reign of Lewis 
the Fourteenth its army mustered a hundred thousand men. With 
the war against Holland it rose to nearly two hundred thousand. In 
the last struggle against the Grand Alliance there was a time when it 
counted nearly half a million of men in arms. Nor was France 
content with these enormous land forces. Since the ruin of Spain the 
fleets of Holland and of England had alone disputed the empire of 
the seas. Under Richelieu and Mazarin France could hardly be 
looked upon as a naval power. But the early years of Lewis saw the 
creation of a navy of loo men of war, and the fleets of France soon 
held their own against England or the Dutch. 

Such a power would have been formidable at any time ; but it was 
doubly formidable when directed by statesmen who in knowledge and 
ability were without rivals in Europe. No diplomatist could compare 
with Lionne, no war minister with Louvois, no financier with Colbert. 
Their young master, Lewis the Fourteenth, bigoted, narrow-minded, 
commonplace as he was, without personal honour or personal courage, 
without gratitude and without pity, insane in his pride, insatiable in 
his vanity, brutal in his selfishness, had still many of the qualities of 
a great ruler : industry, patience, quickness of resolve, firmness of 
purpose, a capacity for discerning greatness and using it, an immense 
self-belief and self-confidence, and a temper utterly destitute indeed 
of real greatness, but with a dramatic turn for seeming to be great. 
As a politician Lewis had simply to reap the harvest which the two 
great Cardinals who went before him had sown. Both had used to 
the profit of France the exhaustion and dissension which the wars of 
religion had brought upon Europe. Richelieu turned the scale against 
the House of Austria by his alhance with Sweden, with the United 
Provinces, and with the Protestant prmces of Germany ; and the two 
great treaties by which Mazarin ended the Thirty Years' War, the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



659 



Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of the Pyrenees, left the Empire 
disorganized and Spain powerless. From that moment indeed Spain\ 
had sunk into a strange decrepitude. Robbed of the chief source 
of her wealth by the independence of Holland, weakened at home 
by the revolt of Portugal, her infantry annihilated by Conde in 
his victory of Rocroi, her fleet ruined by the Dutch, her best blood 
drained away to the Indies, the energies of her people destroyed by 
the suppression of all liberty, civil or religious, her intellectual life 
crushed by the Inquisition, her industry crippled by the expulsion of 
the Moors, by financial oppression, and by the folly of her colonial 
system, the kingdom which under Philip the Second had aimed at the 
empire of the world lay helpless and exhausted under Philip the 
Fourth. The aim of Lewis from 1661, the year when he really became 
master of France, was to carry on the policy of his predecessors, 
and above all to complete the ruin of Spain. The conquest of the 
Spanish provinces in the Netherlands would carry his border to the 
Scheldt. A more distant hope lay in the probable extinction of the 
Austrian line which now sat on the throne of Spain. By securing the 
succession to their throne for a French prince, not only Castile and 
Arragon with the Spanish dependencies in Italy and the Netherlands, 
but the Spanish empire in the New World would be added to the 
dominions of France. Nothing could save Spain but a union of the 
European powers, and to prevent this union by his negotiations was 
a work at which Lewis toiled for years. The intervention of the 
Empire was prevented by a renewal of the old alliances between 
France and the lesser German princes. A league with the Turks 
gave Austria enough to do on her eastern border. The policy of 
Charles the Second bound England to inaction. Spain was at last 
completely isolated, and the death of Philip the Fourth gave a pretence 
for war of which Lewis availed himself in 1667. Flanders was occu- 
pied in two months. Franche-Comte was seized in seventeen days. 
But the suddenness and completeness of the French success awoke a 
general terror before which the King's skilful diplomacy gave way, 
Holland was roused to a sense of danger at home by the appearance 
of French arms on the Rhine. England woke from her lethargy on 
the French seizure of the coast- towns of Flanders. Sweden joined 
the two Protestant powers in the Triple Alliance ; and the dread of 
a wider league forced Lewis to content himself with the southern half 
of Flanders and the possession of a string of fortresses which prac- 
tically left him master of the Netherlands. 

Lewis was. maddened by the check. He not only hated the Dutch as 
Protestants and Republicans ; but he saw in them an obstacle which 
had to be taken out of the v/ay ere he could resume his attack on 
Spain. Four years were spent in preparations for a decisive blow at 
this new enemy. The French army was raised to a hundred and 

U U 2 



^- William of 
OSANGK. 



66o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



eighty thousand men. Colbert created a fleet which rivalled that 
of Holland in number and equipment. Sweden was again wor 
over. England was again secured by the Treaty of Dover. Mean^ 
while Holland lay wrapt in a false security. The alliance with France 
had been its traditional policy, and it was especially dear to the 
party of the great merchant class which had mounted to power or 
the fall of the House of Orange. John de Witt, the leader of thi« 
party, though he had been forced to conclude the Triple Alliance by 
the advance of Lewis to the Rhine, still clung blindly to the friendship 
of France. His trust only broke down when the French army crossed 
the Dutch border in 1672 and the glare of its watch-fires was seen 
from the walls of Amsterdam. For the moment Holland lay crushed 
at the feet of Lewis, but the arrogance of the conqueror roused again 
the stubborn courage which had wrung victory from Alva and worn 
out the pride of Philip the Second. The fall of De Witt raised the . 
Orange party again to power, and called the Prince of Orange to th4 
head of the Republic. Though the young Stadholder^ had hardly » 
reached manhood, his great qualities at once made themselves felt. 
His earlier life had schooled him in a w^onderful self-control. He 
had been left fatherless and all but friendless in childhood, he had 
been bred among men who looked on his very existence as a danger 
to the State, his words had been watched, his looks noted, his friends 
jealously v/ithdrawn. In such an atmosphere the boy grew up silent, 
wary, self-contained, grave in temper, cold in demeanour, blunt and 
even repulsive in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, 
and manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which shook 
his frame with a constant cough ; his face was sullen and bloodless 
and scored with deep lines which told of ceaseless pain. But 
beneath this cold and sickly presence lay a fiery and commanding : 
temper, an immoveable courage, and a political ability of the highest 
order. WiUiam was a born statesman. Neglected as his education 
had been in other ways, for he knew nothing of letters or of art, 
he had been carefully trained in politics by John de Witt ; and the 
wide knowledge with which in his first address to the States-Generai 
the young Stadholder reviewed the general state of Europe, the cool 
courage with which he calculated the chances of the struggle, at 
once won. him the trust of his countrymen. Their trust was soon 
rewarded. Holland was saved, and province after province won back 
from the arms of France^ by William's dauntless resolve. Like his| 
great ancestor, William the Silent, he was a luckless commander, and' 
no general had to bear more frequent defeats. But he profited by 
defeat as other men profit by victory. His bravery indeed was of 
that nobler cast which rises to its height in moments of ruin and 
dismay. The coolness with which, boy-general as he was, he rallied his 
broken squadrons amidst the rout of Seneff and wrested from Conde 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



661 



at the last the fruits of his victory, moved his veteran opponent to a 
generous admiration. It was in such moments indeed that the real 
temper of the man broke through the veil of his usual reserve. A 
strange light flashed from his eyes as soon as he was under fire, and 
in the terror and confusion of defeat his manners took an ease and 
gaiety that charmed every soldier around him. 

The political ability of William was seen in the skill with which 
he drew Spain and the Empire into a coalition against France. But 
France was still matchless in arms, and the effect of her victories was 
seconded by the selfishness of the allies, and above all by the 
treacherous diplomacy of Charles the Second. William was forced 
to consent in 1679 to the Treaty of Nimeguen, which left France 
dominant over Europe as she had never been before. Holland 
indeed was saved from the revenge of Lewis, but fresh spoils had 
been wrested from Spain, and Franche-Comtd, which had been restored 
at the close of the former war, was retained at the end of this. Above 
all France overawed Europe by the daring and success with which she 
had faced, single-handed, the wide coalition against her. Her King's 
arrogance became unbounded. Lorraine was turned into a subject- 
state. Genoa was bombarded, and its Doge forced to seek pardon 
in the antechambers of Versailles. The Pope was humiliated by the 
march of an army upon Rome to avenge a slight offered to the 
French ambassador. The Empire was outraged by a shameless 
seizure of Imperial fiefs in Elsass and elsewhere. J The whole Protes- 
tant world was defied by the horrible cruelties which followed the 
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In the mind of Lewis peace meant 
a series of outrages on the powers around him, but every outrage helped 
the cool and silent adversary who was looking on from the Hague to 
build up the Great Alliance of all Europe, from which alone he looked 
for any effectual check to the ambition of France. The experience of 
the last war had taught William that of such an alliance England must 
form a part ; and we have already seen how much English politics 
were influenced during the reign of Charles by the struggle between 
William and Lewis to secure English aid. A reconciliation of the King 
with his Parliament was an indispensable step towards freeing Charles 
from his dependence on France, and it was to such a reconciliation 
that William at first bent his efforts, but he was foiled by the steadi- 
ness with which Charles clung to the power whose aid was needful 
to carry out the schemes which he was contemplating. In his lean- 
ings towards France however Charles stood utterly alone. His most 
devoted ministers foiled their sovereign's efforts as far as they could. 
Even Arlington, Catholic as at heart he w^as, refused to look on while 
France made the Flemish coast its own, and despatched Temple to 
frame the Triple Alliance which defeated its hopes. Danby was even 
more hostile to France, and in wresting from his master permission to 



\ 



Sec. VII, 



William of 
Okange. 



William 1 

and 

Charles II. 



662 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



offer William the hand of Mary he dealt Lewis what proved to be a 
fatal blow. James was without a son, and the marriage with Mary- 
secured to William on his father-in-law's death the aid of England in 
his great enterprise. But it was impossible to wait for that event, and 
though William, used his new position to bring Charles round to a 
more patriotic policy, his efforts were still fruitless. The storm of the 
Popish Plot complicated his position. In the earher stages of the . 
Exclusion Bill, when the Parliament seemed resolved simply to pass 
over James and to seat Mary at once on the throne after her uncle's 
death, William stood apart from the struggle, doubtful of its issue, 
though prepared to accept the good luck if it came to him. The fatal 
error of Shaftesbury in advancing the claims of Monmouth forced him 
into activity. To preserve his wife's right of succession, with all the 
great issues which were to come of it, no other conrse was left than 
to adopt the cause of the Duke of York. In the crisis of the struggle, 
therefore, William threw his whole weight on the side of James. The 
eloquence of Halifax secured the rejection of the Exclusion Bill, and 
Halifax (as we know now) was the mouthpiece of William. 

But while England was seething with the madness of the Popish 
Plot and of the royalist reaction, the great European struggle was 
drawing nearer and nearer. The patience of Germany was worn out, 
and in 1686 its princes bound themselves in the Treaty of Augs- 
burg to resist further aggressions on the part of France. From that 
moment a fresh war became inevitable, and W^illiam watched the 
course of his father-in-law with redoubled anxiety. His efforts in 
England had utterly failed. James had renewed his brother's secret 
treaty with France, and plunged into a quarrel with his people which 
of itself would have prevented him from giving any aid in a struggle 
abroad. The Prince could only silently look on, with a desperate hope 
that James might yet be brought to a nobler policy. He refused all 
encouragement to the leading malcontents who were already calling on 
him to interfere in arms. On the other hand he declined to support 
the King in his schemes for the abolition of the Test. " You ask me," 
he said to his father-in-law, " to countenance an attack on my religion. 
That I cannot do ! " If he still cherished hopes of bringing about a 
peace between the King and people which might enable him to enlist 
England in the Grand Alliance, they vanished in 1687 before the 
Declaration of Indulgence. In union with Mary he addressed a tem- 
perate protest against this measure to the King. But the discovery of 
the plans which James was now forming, plans which were intended 
to rob Mary of a part of her future dominions as well as to cripple 
for ever the power of England, forced him at last into earnest action. 
The King, felt strong enough to carry tlirough his system of govern- 
ment during his own lifetime ; but the protest of Mary and William 
left little doubt that the changes he had made would be overthrown at 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



663 



his death. He resolved therefore (if we trust the statement of the 
French ambassador) to place Ireland in such a position of indepen- 
dence that she might serve as a refuge for his CathoUc subjects from 
any Protestant successor. Clarendon was succeeded in the charge of 
the island by the Catholic Lord Tyrconnell, and the new governor 
went roughly to work. Every Englishman was turned out of office. 
Every Judge, every Privy Councillor, every Mayor and Alderman 
of a borough, was soon a Catholic and an Irishman. In a few months 
the English ascendency was overthrown, and the life and fortune of 
every English settler were at the mercy of the natives on whom they 
had trampled since Cromwell's day. The Irish army, purged of its 
Protestant soldiers, was entrusted to Catholic officers, and the dread 
of another massacre spread panic through the island. Fifteen hun- 
dred Protestant families fled terror-stricken across the Channel. The 
rest of the Protestants gathered together and prepared for self-defence. 
William had a right on Mary's behalf to guard against such a plan of 
dismembering her inheritance ; and Dykvelt, who was despatched as his 
ambassador to England, organized with wonderful ability the various 
elements of disaffection into a compact opposition. Danby and 
Bishop Compton answered for the Church. The Nonconformists were 
won by a promise of toleration. A regular correspondence was estab- 
lished between the Prince and some of the great nobles. But WilUam 
still shrank from the plan of an intervention in arms. General as the 
disaffection undoubtedly was, the position of James seemed to be secure. 
He counted on the aid of France. He had an army of twenty thousand 
men. Scotland, crushed by the failure of Argyle's rising, could give 
no such aid as it gave to the Long Parliament. Ireland was ready to 
rise for the Catholic cause and to throw, if needed, its soldiers on the 
western coast. Above all it was doubtful if in England itself disaffec- 
tion would turn into actual rebellion. The " Bloody Assize " had left 
its terror on the Whigs. The Tories and the Churchmen, angered as 
they were, were still hampered by their doctrine of non-resistance. It 
was still therefore the aim of William to discourage all violent 
counsels, and to confine himself to organizing such a general opposition 
as would force James by legal means to reconcile himself to the country, 
to abandon his policy at home and abroad, and to join the alliance 
against France. 

But at this moment the whole course of William's policy was changed 
by an unforeseen event. His own patience and that of the nation 
rested on the certainty of Mar/s succession ; for James was without a 
son, and five years had passed since the last pregnancy of his second 
wife, Mary of Modena. But in the midst of the King's struggle with 
the Church it was announced that the Queen was again with child. 
Though the news was received with general unbelief, it at once forced 
on the crisis which William had hoped to defer. If, as the Catholics 



664 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



joyously foretold, the child were a boy, and, as was certain, brought 
up a Catholic, the highest Tory had to resolve at last whether the 
tyranny under which England lay should go on for ever. William 
could no longer blind himself to the need of a struggle and a speedy 
one. " It is now or never," he said to Dykvelt. The hesitation of 
England was indeed at an end. Danby, loyal above all to the Church 
and firm in his hatred of subservience to France, answered for the 
Tories ; Compton for the High Churchmen, goaded at last into re- 
bellion by the Declaration of Indulgence. The Earl of Devonshire, 
the Lord Cavendish of the Exclusion struggle, answered for the 
Whigs. A formal invitation to William to intervene in arms for the 
restoration of English liberty and the protection of the Protestant 
religion was signed by these leaders and carried in June to the Hague 
by Herbert, the most popular of English seamen, who had been 
deprived of his command for a refusal to vote against the Test. The 
nobles who signed it called on William to appear with an army, 
and pledged themselves to rise in arms on his landing. Whatever 
lingering hesitation remained was swept away by the Trial of the 
Bishops and the birth of a Prince of Wales. The invitation was sent 
from London on the very day of the Acquittal. The general excite- ^ j 
ment, the shouts of the boats which covered the river, the bonfires in li 
every street, showed indeed that the country was on the eve of revolt. 
The army itself, on which James had implicitly relied, suddenly 
showed its sympathy with the people. James was at Hounslow when 
the news of the Acquittal reached him, and as he rode from the camp 
he heard a great shout behind him. " V/hat is that ? " he asked. " It 
is nothing," was the reply, " only the soldiers are glad that the Bishops 
are acquitted!" "Do you call that nothing?" grumbled the King. 
The shout told him that he stood utterly alone in his realm. The 
peerage, the gentry, the bishops, the clergy, the Universities, every 
lawyer, every trader, every farmer, stood aloof from Jiim. His very 
soldiers forsook him. The most devoted Catholics- pressed him to 
give way. But to give way was to reverse every act he had done since 
his accession, and to change the whole nature of his government. 
All show of legal rule had disappeared. Sheriffs, mayors, magistrates, 
appointed by the Crown in defiance of a parliamentary statute, were 
no real officers in the eye of the law. Even if the Houses were 
summoned, members returned by officers such as these could form no 
legal Parhament. Hardly a Minister of the Crown or a Privy Coun- 
cillor exercised any lawful authority. James had brought things to 
such a pass that the restoration of legal government meant the 
absolute reversal of every act he had done. But he was in no mood 
to reverse his acts. His temper was only spurred to a more dogged 
obstinacy by danger and remonstrance. He broke up the camp at 
Hounslow and dispersed its trooi.>s in distant cantonments. He 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



66; 



dismissed the two judges who had favoured the acquittal of the 
Bishops. He ordered the chancellor of each diocese to report the 
names of the clergy who had not read the Declaration of Indulgence. 
But his will broke fruitlessly against the sullen resistance which met 
him on every side. Not a chancellor made a return to the Commis- 
sioners, and the Commissioners were cowed into inaction by the 
temper of the nation. When the judges who had displayed their 
servility to the Crown went on circuit the gentry refused to m.eet them. 
A yet fiercer irritation was kindled by the King's resolve to supply 
the place of the English troops, whose temper proved unserviceable 
for his purposes, by draughts from the Catholic army which Tyrcon- 
nell had raised in Ireland. Even the Roman Catholic peers at the 
Council table protested against this measure ; and six officers in a 
single regiment laid down their commissions rather than enroll the 
Irish recruits among their men. The ballad of " Lillibullero," a scurri- 
lous attack on the Irish Papists, was sung from one end of England to 
the other. 

What prevented revolt was the general resolve to wait for the 
appearance of the Prince of Orange. WilHam was gathering forces 
and transports with wonderful rapidity and secresy, while noble after 
noble made their way to the Hague. The Earl of Shrewsbury arrived 
with an offer of ^12,000 towards the expedition. Edward Russell, 
the brother of Lord Russell, appeared as the representative of the 
House of Bedford. They were followed by the representatives of great 
; Tory houses, by the sons of the Marquis of Winchester, of Lord 
Danby, of Lord Peterborough, and by the High Church Lord 
Macclesfield. At home the Earls of Danby and Devonshire prepared 
silently with Lord Lumley for a rising in the North. In spite of the 
profound secresy with which all was conducted, the keen instinct of 
Sunderland, who had stooped to purchase continuance in office at 
the price of an apostasy to Catholicism, detected the preparations 
' of William ; and the sense that his master's ruin was at hand en- 
j couraged him to tell every secret of James on the promise of a 
' pardon for the crimes to which he had lent himself James alone 
( remained stubborn and insensate as of old. He had no fear of a 
I revolt unaided by the Prince of Orange, and he believed that the 
\ threat of a French attack on Holland would render Wilham's aid 
' impossible. But in Septemiber the long-delayed war began, and by 
the greatest political error of his reign Lewis threw his forces not 
on Holland, but on Germany. The Dutch at once felt themselves 
secure ; the States- General gave their sanction to William's pro- 
ject, and the armament he had prepared gathered rapidly in the 
Scheldt. The news no sooner reached England than the King passed 
from obstinacy to panic. By draughts from Scotland and Ireland he 
\ had mustered forty thousand men, but the teniper of the troops 



666 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



robbed him of all trust in them. He dissolved the Ecclesiastical 
Commission. He replaced the magistrates he had driven from office. 
He restored their franchises to the towns. The Chancellor carried 
back the Charter of London in state into the City. James dismissed 
Sunderland from office, and produced before the peers who were in 
London proofs of the birth of his child, which was almost universally 
believed to be a Catholic imposture. But concession and proof came 
too late. Detained by ill winds, beaten back on its first venture by a 
violent storm, William's fleet of six hundred transports, escorted by 
fifty men-of-war, anchored on the fifth of November in Torbay ; and hi? 
army, thirteen thousand men strong, entered Exeter amidst the shouts 
of its citizens. His coming had not been looked for in the West, and 
for a week no great landowner joined him. But nobles and squires 
soon flocked to his camp, and the adhesion of Plymouth secured his 
rear. Meanwhile Danby, dashing at the head of a hundred horsemen 
into York, gave the signal for a rising in the North. The militia 
gave back his shout of " A free Parliament and the Protestant 
Religion ! " Peers and gentry flocked to his standard ; and a march 
on Nottingham united his forces to thase under Devonshire, who had 
mustered at Derby the great lords of the midland and eastern counties. 
Everywhere the revolt was triumphant. The garrison of Hull declared 
for a free Parliament. The Duke of Norfolk appeared at the head of 
three hundred gentlemen in the market-place at Norwich. Townsmen 
and gownsmen greeted Lord Lovelace at Oxford with uproarious 
welcome. Bristol threw open its gates to the Prince of Orange, who 
advanced steadily on Salisbury,, where James had mustered his forces. 
But the Royal army fell back in disorder. Its very leaders were secretly 
pledged to W^illiam, and the desertion of Lord Churchill was followed 
by that of so many other officers that James abandoned the struggle 
in despair. He fled to London to hear that his daughter Anne had 
left St. James' to join Danby at Nottingham. " God help me," cried 
the wretched King, " for my own children have forsaken me 1 " His 
spirit was utterly broken ; and though he promised to call the Houses 
together, and despatched commissioners to Hungerford to treat with 
William on the terms of a free Parliament, in his heart he had re- 
solved on flight. Parliament, he said to the few who still clung to him^ 
would force on him concessions he could not endure ; and he only 
waited for news of the escape of his wife and child to make his way 
to the Isle of Sheppey, where a hoy lay ready to carry him to France. 
Some rough fishermen, who took him for a Jesuit, prevented his escape, 
and a troop of Life Guards brought him back in safety to London : buf 
it was the policy of William and his advisers to further a flight which 
removed their chief difficulty out of the way. It would have been 
hard to depose James had he remained, and perilous to keep him 
prisoner : but the entry of the Dutch troops into London, the silence 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



667 



of the Prince, and an order to leave St. James', filled the King with 
fresh terrors, and taking advantage of the means of escape which were 
almost openly placed at his disposal, James a second time quitted 
London and embarked on the 23rd of December unhindered for France. 
Before flying James had burnt most of the writs convoking the new 
Parliament, had disbanded his army, and destroyed so far as he could 
all means of government. For a few days there was a wild burst of 
panic and outrage in London, but the orderly instinct of the people 
soon reasserted itself. The Lords who were at the moment in London 
provided on their own authority as Privy Councillors for the more 
pressing needs of administration, and resigned their authority into 
William's hands on his arrival in the capital. The difficulty which arose 
from the absence of any person legally authorized to call Parliament 
together was got over by convoking the House of Peers, and forming a 
second body of all members who had sat in the Commons in the reign 
of Charles the Second, with the Aldermen and Common Councillors of 
London. Both bodies requested William to take on himself the pro- 
visional government of the kingdom, and to issue circular letters in- 
viting the electors of every town and county to send up representatives 
to a Convention which met in January, 1689. Both Houses w^ere 
found equally resolved against any recall of or negotiation with the 
fallen King. But with this step their unanimity ended. The Whigs, 
who formed a majority in the Commons, voted a resolution which, 
illogical and inconsistent as it seemed, was well adapted to unite 
in its favour every element of the opposition to James ; the Churchman 
who was simply scared by his bigotry, the Tory who doubted the right 
of a nation to depose its King, the Whig who held the theory of a 
contract between King and People. They voted that King James, 
"having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of this kingdom by 
breaking the original contract between King and People, and by the 
advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons having violated the 
fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, 
has abdicated the Government, and that the throne is thereby vacant." 
But in the Lords the Tories were still in the ascendant, and the 
resolution was fiercely debated. Archbishop Sancroft with the High 
Tories held that no crime could bring about a forfeiture of the crown, 
and that James still remained King, but that his tyranny had given the 
nation a right to withdraw from him the actual exercise of government 
and to entrust its functions to a Regency. The moderate Tories under 
Danby's guidance admitted that James had ceased to be King, but 
denied that the throne could be vacant, and contended that from the 
moment of his abdication the sovereignty vested in his daughter Mary. 
It was in vain that the eloquence of Halifax backed the Whig, peers 
in struggling for the resolution of the Commons as it stood. The 
plan of a Regency was lost by a single vote, and Danby's scheme was 



668 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



adopted by a large majority. But both the Tory courses found a sudden 
obstacle in WilUam. He declined to be Regent. He had no mind, 
he said, to Danby, to be his wife^s gentleman-usher. Mary, on the 
other hand, refused to accept the crown save in conjunction with her 
husband. The two declarations put an end to the question. It was 
agreed that William and Mary should be acknowledged as jomt 
sovereigns, but that the actual administration should rest with William 
alone. Somers, a young lawyer who had just distinguished himself 
in the trial of the Bishops, and who was destined to play a great part 
in later history, drew up a Declaration of Rights which was presented 
on February 13th to William and Mary by the two Houses in the 
banquetting-room at Whitehall. It recited the misgovernment of 
James, his abdication, and the resolve of the Lords and Commons 
to assert the ancient rights and liberties of English subjects. It 
denied the right of any king to exercise a dispensing power, or to 
exact money or to maintain an army save by consent of Farliamxnt. 
It asserted for the subject a right to petition, to a free choice of - 
representatives in Parliament, and a pure and merciful administration 
of justice. It declared the right of both Houses to liberty of debate. 
In full faith that these principles would be accepted and maintained by 
William and Mary, it ended with declaring the Prince and Princess of 
Orange King and Queen of England. At the close of the Declaration, 
Halifax, in the name of the Estates of the Realm, prayed them to 
receive the crown. William accepted the offer in his own name and 
his wife's, and declared in a few words the resolve of both to maintain 
the laws and to govern by advice of Parliament. 

Section VIII — The Grand Alliance. 1689— 1 694-. 

{Authorities. — As before.] 



The blunder of Lewis in choosing Germany instead of Holland for 
his point of attack was all but atoned for by the brilliant successes 
with which he opened the war. The whole country west of the Rhine 
was soon in his hands ; his armies were master of the Palatinate, and 
penetrated even to Wurtemburg. His hopes had never been higher 
than at the momient when the arrival of James at St. Germains 
dashed all hope to the ground. Lewis was at once thrown back on a 
war of defence, and the brutal ravages which marked the retreat of 
his armies from the Rhine revealed the bitterness with which his 
pride stooped to the necessity. The Palatinate was turned into a 
desert. The same ruin fell on the stately palace of the Elector at 
Heidelberg, on the venerable tombs of the Emperors at Speyer, on the 
town oi the trader, on the hut of the vine-dresser. Outrages such as 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



669 



these only hastened the work of his great rival. In accepting the 
Enghsh throne WiUiam had knit together England and Holland, the 
two great Protestant powers whose fleets had the mastery of the sea, 
as his diplomacy had knit all Germany together a year before in the 
Treaty of Augsburg. But the formation of the Grand Alliance might 
still have been delayed by the reluctance of the Emperor to league 
with Protestant States against a Catholic King, when the ravage of 
the Palatinate woke a thirst for vengeance in every German heart 
before which all hesitation passed away. The reception of James as 
still King of England at St. Germains gave England just ground for a 
declaration of war, a step in which it was soon followed by Holland, and 
the two countries at once agreed to stand by one another in their struggle 
against France. The adhesion of the Empire and of the two branches 
of the House of Austria to this agreement completed the Grand 
Alliance which William had designed. When Savoy joined the allies 
in May 1689, France found herself girt in on every side save 
Switzerland with a ring of foes. The Scandinavian kingdoms alone 
stood aloof from the confederacy of Europe, and their neutrality was 
unfriendly to France. Lewis was left without a single ally save the 
Turk : but the energy and quickness of movement w^hich sprang 
from the concentration of the power of France in a single hand still 
left the contest an equal one. The Empire was slow ; Austria was 
distracted by the war with the Turks ; Spain was all but powerless ; 
Holland and England w^ere alone earnest in the struggle, and England 
could as yet give little aid in the war. An English brigade, formed 
from the regiments raised by James, joined the Dutch army on 
the Sambre, and distinguished itself under Churchill, who had been 
rewarded for his treason by the title of Earl of Marlborough, in a brisk 
skirmish with the enemy at Walcourt. But William had as yet grave 
work to do at home. 

In England not a sword had been drawn for James. In Scotland 
his tyranny had been yet greater than in England, and so far as the 
Lowlands went the fall of his tyranny was as rapid and complete. No 
sooner had he called his troops southward to meet William's invasion 
than Edinburgh rose in revolt. The western peasants were at once 
up in arms, and the Episcopalian clergy who had been the instruments 
of the Stuart misgovernment ever since the Restoration were rabbled 
and driven from their parsonages in every parish. The news of 
these disorders forced William to act, though he was without a show 
of legal authority over Scotland ; and, on the advice of the Scotch 
Lords present in London, he ventured to summon a Convention 
similar to that which had been summoned in England, and on his own 
responsibility to set aside the laws which excluded Presbyterians from 
the Scotch Parliament. This Convention resolved that James had 
forfeited the crown by misgovernment, and offered it to William and 



670 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH JFEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Mary. The ofifer was accompanied by a Claim of Right framed on 
the model of the Declaration of Rights to which they had consented 
in England, but closing with a demand for the abolition of Prelacy. 
Both crown and claim were accepted, and the arrival of the Scotch 
regiments which William had brought from Holland gave strength to 
the new Government. Its strength was to be roughly tested. John 
Graham of Claverhouse, whose cruelties in the persecution of the 
Western Covenanters had been rewarded by the title of Viscount 
Dundee, Avithdrew with a few troopers from Edinburgh to the High- 
lands, and appealed to the clans. In the Highlands nothing was 
known of English government or misgovernment : all that the Revo- 
lution meant to a Highlander was the restoration of the House of 
Argyle. The Macdonalds, the Macleans, the Camerons, were as 
ready to join Dundee in fighting their old oppressors, the Camp- 
bells, and the Government which upheld them, as they had been 
ready to join Montrose in the same cause forty years before. As 
William's Scotch regiments under General Mackay climbed the pass of 
KiUiecrankie (July 27, 1689), Dundee charged them at the head of three 
thousand clansmen and swept them in headlong rout down the glen. 
But his death in the moment of victory broke the only bond which 
held the Highlanders together, and in a few weeks the host which had 
spread terror through the Lowlands melted helplessly away. In the 
next summer Mackay was able to build the strong post of Fort 
William in the very heart of the disaffected country, and his offers of 
money and pardon brought about the submission of the clans. Sir 
John Dalrymple, the Master of Stair, in whose hands the govern- 
ment of Scotland at this time mainly rested, had hoped that a refusal 
of the oath of allegiance would give grounds for a war of extermina- 
tion and free Scotland for ever from its terror of the Highlanders. He 
had provided for the expected refusal by orders of a ruthless severity. 
"Your troops," he wrote to the officer in command, ^' will destroy entirely 
the country of Lochaber, LocheiFs lands, Keppoch's, Glengarry's, and 
Glencoe's. Your powers shall be large enough. I hope the soldiers 
will not trouble the Government with prisoners." But his hopes were 
disappointed by the readiness with which the clans accepted the offers 
of the Government. All submitted in good time save Macdonald of 
Glencoe, whose pride delayed his taking of the oath till six days after 
the latest date fixed by the proclamation. Foiled in his larger hopes 
of destruction, Dalrymple seized eagerly on the pretext given by 
Macdonald, and an order '' for the extirpation of that nest of robbers" 
was laid before William and received the royal signature. " The 
work," wrote the Master of Stair to Colonel Hamilton who under- 
took it, " must be secret and sudden." The troops were chosen from 
among the Campbells, the deadly foes of the clansmen of Glencoe, 
and quartered peacefully omon^c the Macdonalds for twelve days^ 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



67r 



till all suspicion of their errand disappeared. At daybreak (Feb. 13, 
1692) they fell on their hosts, and in a few moments thirty of the clans- 
folk lay dead on the snow. The rest, sheltered by a storm, escaped to 
the mountains to perish for the most part of cold and hunger. " The 
only thing I regret," said the Master of Stair when the news reached 
him, "is that any got away." Whatever horror the Massacre of 
Glencoe has roused in later days, few save Dalrymple knew of it at the 
time. The peace of the Highlands enabled the work of reorganization 
to go on quietly at Edinburgh. In accepting the Claim of Right with its 
repudiation of Prelacy, WiUiam had in effect restored the Presbyterian 
Church, and its restoration was accompanied by the revival of the 
Westminster Confession as a standard of faith, and by the passing of 
an Act which abohshed lay patronage. Against the Toleration Act 
which the King proposed, the Scotch Parliament stood firm. But the 
King was as firm in his purpose as the Parliament. So long as he 
reigned, William declared in memorable words, there should be no 
persecution for conscience sake. "We never could be of that mind 
that violence was suited to the advancing of true religion, nor do we 
intend that our authority shall ever be a tool to the irregular passions 
of any party." 

It was not in Scotland, however, but in Ireland that James and 
Lewis hoped to arrest William's progress. As we have noticed before, 
James had resolved soon after his accession to make Ireland a 
refuge for himself and his CathoHc subjects in case of mishap. As 
we have seen, Lord Tyrconnell had been made general, and 
then raised to the post of Lord Deputy, with a view to the carrying 
out of this purpose ; the army had been remodelled, by the disband- 
ing its Protestant soldiers and filling the ranks with Papists ; a 
similar process had " purified " the bench of judges ; the town char- 
ters had been seized into the King's hands, and Catholic Mayors 
and Catholic Sheriffs set at the head of every city and county. With 
power thus placed in the hands of their bitter enemies, the terror of 
a new Irish massacre spread fast among the humbled Protestants. 
Those of the south for the most part forsook their homes and fled 
over sea, while those of the north drew together at Enniskillen and 
Londonderry. The news of the King's fall intensified the panic. 
P^or two months Tyrconnell intrigued with William's Government, but 
his aim was simply to gain time, and at the opening of 1689 a 
flag was hoisted over Dublin Castle, with the words embroidered on 
its folds " Now or Never." The signal called every Catholic to arms. 
The maddened natives flung themselves on the plunder which their 
masters had left, and in a few weeks havoc was done, the French envoy 
told Lewis, which it would take years to repair. Meanwhile James 
sailed from France to Kinsalc. His first work was to crush the 
Protestants who stood in arms in the north. Fifty thousand men 



672 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



The Grand 

Alliance. 

1639- 

1694. 



had gathered to Tyrconneirs standard, and about half the number 
were sent against Londonderry, where the bulk of the fugitives found 
shelter behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns, and destitute 
even of a ditch. But the seven thousand desperate Englishmen 
behind the wall made up for its weakness. So fierce were their sallies, 
so crushing the repulse of his attack, that the King's general, Hamilton 
at last turned the siege into a blockade. The Protestants died of 
hunger in the streets^ and of the fever which comes of hunger, but the 
cry of the town was still "No Surrender." The siege had lasted a 
hundred and five days, and only two days' food remained in London- 
derry, v/hen on the 28th of July an English ship broke the boom 
across the river, and the besiegers sullenly withdrew. Their defeat was 
turned into a rout by the men of Enniskillen,. who struggled througti 
a bog to charge an Irish force of double their number at Newtowr 
Butler, and drove horse and foot before them in a panic which soon 
spread through Hamilton's whole army. The routed soldiers fell 
back on Dublin, where James lay helpless in the hands of the frenzied 
Catholics. In the Parliament he had summoned every member re- 
turned was an Irishman and a Papist, and its one aim was the ruin 
of the EngHsh settlers. The Act of Settlement, on which all title 
to property rested, was at once repealed. Three thousand Protestants 
of name and fortune were massed together in the hugest Bill oi 
Attainder which the world has seen. In spite of the love which 
James professed for religious freedom, the Protestant clergy were 
driven from their parsonages. Fellows and scholars were turned out 
of Trinity College, and the French envoy, the Count of Avaux, dared 
even to propose a general massacre of the Protestants who still 
lingered in the districts which had submitted to James. To his 
credit the King shrank horror-struck from the proposal. " I cannot 
be so cruel," he said, " as to cut their throats while they live peace- 
ably under my government." " Mercy to Protestants," was the cold 
reply, " is cruelty to Catholics." 

Through the long agony of Londonderry, through the proscription 
and bloodshed of the new Irish rule, William was forced to look 
helplessly on. The best troops in the army v/hich had been mustered 
at Hounslow followed Marlborough to the Sambre ; and with the 
political embarrassments which grew up around the Government it was 
unable to spare a man of those who remained. The great ends of 
the Revolution were indeed secured, even amidst the confusion and 
intrigue which we shall have to describe, by the common consent of all. 
On the great questions of civil liberty Whig and Tory were now at one. 
The Declaration of Right was turned into the Bill of Rights, and the 
passing of this measure in 1689 restored to the monarchy the character 
which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right of 
, the people through its representatives to depose the King, to change 



IX.] 
tftie 



THE REVOLUTION. 



673 



e order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, 
was now established. All claim of Divine Right, or hereditary right 
independent of the law, was formally put an end to by the election of 
William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been 
able to advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on 
a particular clause in a particular Act of Parliament. William, Mary, 
and Anne, were sovereigns simply by virtue of the Bill of Rights. 
George the First and his successors have been sovereigns solely by 
virtue of the Act of Settlement. An English monarch is now as much 
the creature of an Act of Parliament as the pettiest tax-gatherer in his 
realm. A limitation of the right of succession which expressed this 
parliamentary origin of the sovereign's right in the strongest possible 
way was found in the provision " that whosoever shall hereafter come 
to the possession of this crown shall join in communion with the Church 
of England as by law established." Nor was the older character of 
the kingship alone restored. The older constitution returned with it. 
Bitter experience had taught England the need of restoring to the Par- 
liament its absolute power over taxation. The grant of revenue for life 
to the last two kings had been the secret of their anti-national policy, 
and the first act of the new legislature was to restrict the grant of the 
royal revenue to a term of four years. William was bitterly galled 
by the provision. " The gentlemen of England trusted King James," 
he said, " who was an enemy of their religion and their laws, and they 
will not trust me, by whom their religion and their laws have been 
preserved." But the only change brought about in the Parliament by 
this burst of royal anger was a resolve henceforth to make the vote 
of supplies an annual one, and this resolve has been adhered to ever 
since. A change of almost as great importance established the control 
of Parliament over the army. The hatred to a standing army which 
had begun under Cromwell had only deepened under James ; but 
with the continental war the existence of an army was a necessity. 
As yet, however, it was a force which had no legal existence. The 
soldier was simply an ordinary subject ; there were no legal means of 
punishing strictly military offences or of providing for military discipline : 
and the assumed power of billeting soldiers in private houses had been 
taken away by the law. The difficulty both of Parliament and the army 
was met by the Mutiny Act. The powers requisite for discipline in 
the army were conferred by Parliament on its officers, and provision 
was made for the pay of the force, but both pay and disciplinary 
powers were granted only for a single year. The Mutiny Act, like 
the grant of supplies, has remained annual ever since the Revo- 
lution ; and as it is impossible for the State to exist without supplies, 
or for the army to exist without discipline and pay, the annual assembly 
of Parliament has become a matter of absolute necessity, and the 
greatest constitutional change which our history has witnessed was 

X X 



The Grand 

^LLIANCE. 

1689- 
1694.. 



^674 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[< :hap. 



thus brought about in an indirect but perfectly efficient way. ^ilc 
dangers which experience had lately shown lay in the Parliament 
itself were met with far less skill Under Charles, England had seen 
a Parliament, which had been returned in a moment of reaction, 
maintained without fresh election for eighteen years. A Triennial 
Bill, which limited the duration of a Parliament to three, was passed 
with little opposition, but fell before the dislike and veto of William. 
To counteract the influence which a king might obtain by crowding 
the Commons with officials proved a yet harder task. A Place Bill, 
which excluded all persons in the employment of the State from a seat 
in Parliament, was defeated, and wisely defeated, in the Lords. The 
modern course of excluding all minor officials, but of preserving the/ 
hold of Parliament over the great officers of State by admitting them 
into its body, seems as yet to have occurred to nobody. It is equally 
strange that while vindicating its right of ParHamentary control over 
the public revenue and the army, the Bill of Rights should have 
left by its silence the control of trade to the Crown. It was only 
a few years later, in the discussions on the charter granted to the 
East India Company, that the Houses silently claimed and obtained 
the right of regulating English commerce. 

The religious results of the Revolution were hardly less weighty than 
the political. In the common struggle against Catholicism, Churchman 
and Nonconformist had found themselves, as we have seen, strangely at 
one ; and schemes of Comprehension became suddenly popular. 
But with the fall of James the union of the two bodies abruptly 
ceased : and the establishment of a Presbyterian Church in Scotland, 
together with the " rabbling " of the Episcopalian clergy in its western 
shires, revived the old bitterness of the clergy towards the dissidents. 
The Convocation rejected the scheme of the Latitudinarians for such 
modifications of the Prayer-book as would render possible a return of 
the Nonconformists, and a Comprehension BiJl which was introduced 
into Parliament failed to pass in spite of the King's strenuous support. 
William's attempt to admit Dissenters to civil equality by a repeal of 
the Test and Corporation Act proved equally fruitless. Active persecu- 
tion, however, had now become impossible, and the passing of a 
Toleration Act in.JL682 established a complete freedom of worship. 
Whatever the religious effect of the failure of the Latitudinarian schemes 
may have been, its political effect has been of the highest value. At 
no time had the Church been so strong or so popular as at the Revolu- 
tion, and the reconciliation of the Nonconformists would have doubled 
its strength. It is doubtful whether the disinclination to all political 
-. change v/hich has characterised it during the last two hundred years 
j would have been affected by such a change ; but it is certain that the 
power of opposition which it has wielded would have been enormously 
1 increased. As it was, the Toleration Act established a group of 



IX" 



THE REVOLUTION. 



675 



reJigious bodies, whose religious opposition to the Church forced them 
to support the measures of progress which the Church opposed. With 
rehgious forces on the one side and on the other, England has es- 
caped the great stumbHng-block in the way of nations where the cause 
of religion has become identified with that of political reaction. A 
recession from within its own ranks weakened the Church still more. 
The doctrine of Divine Right had a strong hold on the body of the 
:lergy, though they had been driven from their other favourite doctrine 
of passive obedience, and the requirement of the oath of allegiance to 
the new sovereigns from all persons in public functions was resented as 
an intolerable wrong by almost every parson. Sancroft, the Archbishop 
of Canterbury, with a few prelates and a large number of the 
higher clergy, absolutely refused the oath, treated all who took 
it as schismatics, and on their deprivation by Act of Parliament 
regarded themselves and their adherents, who were known as Non- 
jurors, as the only members of the true Church of England. The bulk 
of the clergy bowed to necessity, but their bitterness against the new 
Government was fanned by the expulsion of the Non-jurors into a flame, 
and added to the difficulties which William had to encounter. 

Not the least of his difficulties arose from the temper of his Parlia- 
ments. In 1689 the Convention declared itself a Parliament. In 
the Commons the bulk of the members were Whigs, and their first acts 
were to redress the wrongs which the Whig party had suffered 
during the last two reigns. The attainder of Lord Russell was reversed. 
The judgments against Sidney, Cornish, and Alice Lisle were annulled 
In spite of the opinion of the judges that the sentence on Titus Gates 
had been against law, the Lords refused to reverse it, but even Gates 
received a pardon and a pension. The Whigs however wanted, not 
only the redress of wrongs, but the punishment of the wrong-doers. 
Whig and Tory had been united, indeed, by the tyranny of James ; both 
parties had shared in the Revolution, and William had striven to pro- 
long their union by joining the leaders of both in his first Ministry. He 
named the Tory Danby Lord President, made the Whig Shrewsbury 
Secretary of State, and gave the Privy Seal to Halifax, a trimmer be- 
tween the one party and the other. But save in a moment of common 
oppression or common danger union was impossible. The Whigs 
clamoured for the punishment of Tories who had joined in the illegal 
acts of Charles and of James. They refused to pass the Bill of General 
Indemnity which William laid before them. William on the other hand 
was resolved that no bloodshed or proscription should follow the revo- 
lution which had placed him on the throne. His temper was averse 
to persecution ; he had no great love for either of the battling parties ; 
and above all he saw that internal strife would be fatal to the effective 
prosecution of the war. While the cares of his new throne were chain- 
ing him to England, the confederacy of which he was the guiding 

X X 2 



676 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[GlAP. 



spirit was proving too slow and too loosely compacted to cope with ine 
swift and resolute movements of France. The armies of Lewis had 
fallen back within their own borders, but only to turn fiercely at bay. 
The junction of the English and Dutch fleets failed to assure them the 
mastery of the seas. The English navy was paralysed by the corrup- 
tion which prevailed in the public service, as well as by the sloth and 
incapacity of its commander. The services of Admiral Herbert at 
the Revolution had been rewarded by the earldom of Torrili^on and 
the command of the fleet ; but his indolence suffered the seas to be 
swept by French privateers, and his want of seamanship was shown in 
an indecisive engagement with a French squadron in Bantry Bay. 
Meanwhile Lewis was straining every nerve to win the command of the 
Channel ; the French dockyards were turning out ship after ship, and 
the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet were brought round to reinforce 
the fleet at Brest. A French victory off the English coast would have 
brought serious political danger, for the reaction of popular feeling 
which had begun in favour of James had been increased by the pres- 
sure of the war, by the taxation, by the expulsion of the Non-jurors 
and the discontent of the clergy, by the panic of the Tories at the 
spirit of vengeance which broke out among the triumphant Whigs, and 
above all by the presence of James in Ireland. A new party, that of 
the Jacobites or adherents of King James, was just forming ; and it 
was feared that a Jacobite rising would follow the appearance of a 
French fleet on the coast. In such a state of affairs William judged 
rightly that to yield to the Whig thirst for vengeance would have 
been to ruin his cause. He dissolved the Parliament, issued in his 
own name a general pardon for all political oflences, under the title of 
an Act of Grace, and accepted the resignations of the more violent 
Whigs among his counsellors. Danby was entrusted with the chief 
administration of affairs ; for Danby had power over the Tories, and in 
the new Parliament which was called in 1690 the bulk of the mem- 
bers proved Tories. William's aim in this sudden change of front was 
to secure a momentary lull in English faction which would suffer him 
to strike at the rebellion in Ireland. While James was King in Dublin 
it was hopeless to crush treason at home ; and so urgent was the 
danger, so precious every moment in the present juncture of affairs, 
that William could trust no one to bring the work as sharply to an end 
as was needful save himself. 

In the autumn of the year 1689 the Duke of Schomberg had been 
sent with a small force to Ulster, but his landing had only roused 
Ireland to a fresh enthusiasm. The ranks of the Irish army were 
filled up at once, and James was able to face the duke at Drogheda 
I with a force double that of his opponent. Schomberg, whose forces 
I were all raw recruits whom it was hardly possible to trust at such 
j odds in the field, entrenched himself at Dundalk, in a camp where 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



677 



pestilence soon swept off half his men, till winter parted the two 
aiinies. During the next six months James, whose treasury was 
utterly exhausted, stl-ove to fill it by a coinage of brass money, 
while his soldiers subsisted by sheer plunder. Wilham meanwhile 
was toihng hard on the other side of the Channel to bring the w^ 
to an end. Schomberg was strengthened during the winter with 
men and stores, and when the spring came his force reached thirty 
thousand men. Lewis, too, felt the importance of the coming struggle ; 
and seven thousand picked Frenchmen, under the Count of Lauzun, 
were despatched to reinforce the army of James. They had hardly 
arrived when William himself landed at Carrickfergus, and pushed 
rapidly to the south. His columns soon caught sight of the Irish army, 
posted strongly behind the Boyne. "I am glad to see you, gentlemen," 
William cried with a burst of delight ; " and if you escape me now 
the fault will be mine." Early next morning, the First of July, 1690, 
the whole English army plunged into the river. The Irish foot 
broke in a shameful panic, but the horse made so gallant a stand that 
Schomberg fell in repulsing its charge, and for a time the English 
centre was held in check. With the arrival of William, however, at the 
head of the left wing, all was over. James, who had looked helplessly 
on, fled to Dublin and took ship at Kinsale for France, while the 
capital threw open its gates to the conqueror. The cowardice of the 
Stuart sovereign moved the scorn even of his followers. " Change 
kings with us," an Irish officer replied to an Englishman who taunted 
him with the panic of the Boyne, " change kings with us, and we will 
fight you again." They did better in fighting without a king. The 
French, indeed, withdrew scornfully from the routed army as it stood 
at bay beneath the walls of Limerick. " Do you call these ramparts .'* " 
sneered Lauzun : " the English will need no cannon ; they may batter 
them down with roasted apples." But twenty thousand men remained 
with Sarsfield, a brave and skilful officer who had seen service in 
England and abroad ; and his daring surprise of the English ammu- 
nition tram, his repulse of a desperate attempt to storm the town, and 
the approach of the winter, forced William to raise the siege. The 
turn of the war abroad recalled him to England, and he left his work 
to one who was quietly proving himself a master in the art of war. 
Lord Marlborough had been recalled from Flanders to command a 
division which had landed in the south of Ireland. Only a few days 
remained before winter would come to break off operations, but the 
few days were turned to good account. Cork, with five thousand men 
behind its walls, was taken in forty-eight hours. Kinsale a few days 
later shared the fate of Cork. Winter indeed left Connaught and the 
greater part of Munster in Irish hands ; the French force remained 
untouched, and the coming of a new French general, St. Ruth, with 
arms and suppUes, encouraged the insurgents. But the spring of 169 1 



The Granl 

Alt.iance. 

16S9- 

1694.. 



67S 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



had hardly opened when Ginkell, the new English general, by his 
seizure of Athlone forced on a battle with the combined French and 
Irish forces at Aughrim, in which St. Ruth fell on the field and his 
army was utterly broken. The defeat left Limerick alone in its revolt, 
and even Sarsfield bowed to the necessity of a surrender. Two 
treaties were drawn up between the Irish and English generals. By 
the first it was stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy 
such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consistent with 
law, or as they had enjoyed in the reign of Charles the Second. 
Both sides were, of course, well aware that such a treaty was 
merely waste paper, for Ginkell had no power to conclude it, nor 
had the Irish Lords Justices. The latter, indeed, only promised 
to do all they could to bring about its ratification by Parliament, and 
this ratification was never granted. By the military treaty, those of 
Sarsfield's soldiers who would were suffered to follow him to France ; 
and ten thousand men, the whole of his force, chose exile rather than 
life in a land where all hope of national freedom was lost. When the 
wild cry of the women who stood watching their departure was 
hushed, the silence of death settled down upon Ireland. For a 
hundred years the country remained at peace, but the peace was 
a peace of despair. The most terrible legal tyranny under which a 
nation has ever groaned avenged the rising undei Tyrconnell. The 
conquered people, in Swift's bitter words of contempt, became " hewers 
of wood and drawers of water " to their conquerors : but till the very 
eve of the French Revolution Ireland ceased to be a source of terror 
and anxiety to England. 

Short as the struggle of Ireland had been, it had served Lewis well, 
for while William was busy at the Boyne a series of brilliant successes 
restored the fortunes of France. In Flanders the Duke of Luxembourg 
won the victory of Fleurus. In Italy Marshal Catinat defeated the 
Duke of Savoy. A success of even greater moment, the last victory 
which France was fated to win at sea, placed for an instant the very 
throne of William in peril. William never showed a cooler courage 
than in quitting England to fight James in Ireland at a moment 
when the Jacobites were only looking for the appearance of a French 
fleet on the coast to rise in revolt. He was hardly on his way in 
fact when Tourville, the French admiral, put to sea with strict orders 
to fight. He was met by the English and Dutch fleet at Beachy Head, 
and the Dutch division at once engaged. Though utterly out- 
numbered,' it fought stubbornly in hope of Herbert's aid ; but Herbert, 
whether from cowardice or treason, looked idly on while his allies were 
crushed, and withdrew at nightfall to seek shelter in the Thames, The 
danger was as great as the shame, for Tourville's victory left him 
master of the Channel, and his presence off the coast of Devon invited 
the Jacobites to revolt. But whatever the discontent of Tories and 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



■679 



Non-jurors against William might be, all signs of it vanished with the 
landing of the French. The burning of Teignmouth by Tourville's 
sailors called the whole coast to arms ; and the news of the Boyne 
put an end to all dreams of a rising in favour of James. The natural 
reaction against a cause which looked for foreign aid gave a new 
strength for the moment to William in England ; but ill luck still 
hung around the Grand Alliance. So urgent was the need for his 
presence abroad that William left as we have seen his work in Ireland 
ondone, and crossed in the spring of 1691 to Flanders. It was the 
first time since the days of Henry the Eighth that an English king 
had appeared on the Continent at the head of an English army. 
But the slowness of the allies again baffled William's hopes. He was | 
forced to look on with a small army while a hundred thousand [ 
Frenchmen closed suddenly around Mons, the strongest fortress of the ^ 
Netherlands, and made themselves master of it in the presence of; 
Lewis. The humiliation was great, and for the moment all trust in • 
William's fortune faded away. In England the blow was felt more 
heavily than elsewhere. The treason which had been crushed byi 
the indignation at Tourville's descent woke up to a fresh life. Leading 
Tories, such as Lord Clarendon and Lord Dartmouth, opened com- 
munications with James ; and some of the leading Whigs, with the : 
Earl of Shrewsbury at their head, angered at what they regarded as 
William's ingratitude, followed them in their course. In Lord Marl- r 
borough's mind the state of affairs raised hopes of a double treason. \ 
His design was to bring about a revolt which would drive William ' 
from the throne without replacing James, and give the crown to ■- 
his daughter Anne, whose affection for Marlborough's wife w^ould ~ 
place the real government of England in his hands. A yet greater ; 
danger lay in the treason of Admiral Rassell, who had succeeded ^ 
Torrington in command of the fleet. Russell's defection would have '■ 
removed the one obstacle to a new attempt which James was resolved i 
to make for the recovery of his throne, and which Lewis had been | 
brought to support. In the beginning of 1692 an army of thirty ! 
thousand troops were quartered in Normandy in readiness for a ! 
descent on the English coast. Transports were provided for their I 
passage, and Tourville was ordered to cover it with the French fleet at ; 
Brest. Though Russell had twice as many ships as his opponent, the I 
behef in his purpose of betraying William's cause was so strong that ' 
Lewis ordered Tourville to engage the allied fleets at any disadvan- \ 

age. But whatever Russell's intrigues may have meant, he was no I 
Herbert. "Do not think I will let the French trium.ph over us in | 
our own seas," he warned his Jacobite correspondents. " If I meet i 
them I will fight them, even though King James were on board." | 
When the two fleets met off the Norman coast his fierce attack proved 

Russell true to his w^ord. Tourville's fifty vessels proved no match for | 



Sl5C. VIII. 

Thb Grakd 

Alliance. 

1689- 
1694-. 



1691. 



E692. 



68o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



The Grand 

Alliance. 

1689- 

1694. 



^ 



the ninety ships of the allies, and after five hours of a brave struggle 
the French were forced to fly along the rocky coast of the Cotentin. 
Twenty-two of their vessels reached St. Malo ; thirteen anchored with 
Tourville in the bays of Cherbourg and La Hogue ; but their pursuers 
were soon upon them, and a 'bold attack of the English boats burnt 
ship after ship under the eyes of the French army. Ail dread of the 
invasion was at once at an end ; and the throne of William was 
secured by the detection and suppression of the Jacobite conspiracy 
at home which the invasion was intended to support. But the over- 
throw of the Jacobite hopes was the least result of the victory of 
La Hogue. France ceased from that moment to exist as a great naval 
power ; for though her fleet was soon recruited to its former strength, 
the confidence of her sailors was lost, and not even Tourville ventured 
again to tempt in battle the fortune of the seas. A new hope, too, 
broke on the Grand Alliance, The spell of French triumph was 
broken. The Duke of Luxembourg strove to restore the glory of the 
French arms by his victories over William in the two following years 
( 1 693-1 694) at Steinkirk and Neerwinden ; but the battles were useless 
butcheries, in which the conquerors lost as many men as the conquered. 
From that moment France felt herself disheartened and exhausted by 
I the vastness of her efforts. The public misery was extreme. " The 
I country," F^nelon wrote frankly to Lewis, " is a vast hospital." For 
the first time in his long career of prosperity Lewis bent his pride 
to seek peace at the sacrifice of his conquests, and though the effort 
was a vain one it told that the daring hopes of French ambition were 
at an end, and that the work of the Grand Alliance was practically 
done. 

In outer seeming, the Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the 
sovereignty over England from James to William and Mary. In 
actual fact, it was transferring the sovereignty from the King to the 
House of Commons. From the moment when its sole right to tax 
the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its own 
resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual supplies to the 
Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme power in the 
State. It was impossible permanently to suspend its sittings, or, in 
the long run, to oppose its will, when either course must end in leaving 
the Government penniless, in breaking up the army and navy, and in 
rendering the public service impossible. But though the constitu- 
tional change was complete, the machinery of government was far 
from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life 
which such a change brought about. However powerful the will of 
the House of Commons might be, it had no means of bringing 
its will directly to bear upon the conduct of public affairs. The 
Ministers who had charge of them were not its servants, but the 
servants of the Crown ; it was from the King that they looked for 



IX] 



THE REVOLUTION". 



68i 



Sec. VIII. 

The Grand 

Alliance. 

1689- 

1694. 



direction, and to the King that they held themselves responsible. By 
impeachment or more indirect means the Commons could force a 
King to remove a Minister who contradicted their will ; but they had no 
constitutional power to replace the fallen statesman by a Minister who 
would carry out their will. The result was the growth of a temper in 
the Lower House which drove William and his Ministers to despair. 
It became as corrupt, as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves, as 
factious in spirit, as bodies always become whose consciousness of the 
possession of power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness 
of the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power 
which they possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the 
suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen ; and 
it blamed the Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. 
But it was hard to find out what policy or measures it would have 
preferred. Its mood changed, as William bitterly complained, with 
every hour. It was, in fact, without the guidance of recognized leaders, 
without adequate information, and destitute of that organization out 
of which alone a definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the 
inborn political capacity of the English mind than that it should at 
once have found a simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as 
this. The credit of the solution belongs to a man whose political 
character was of the lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had 
been a Minister in the later days of Charles the Second ; and he had 
remained Minister through almost all the reign of James. He had 
held office at last only by compliance with the worst tyranny of his 
master^ and by a feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. 
But the ruin of James was no sooner certain than he had secured 
pardon and protection from William by the betrayal of the master to 
whom he had sacrificed his conscience and his honour. Since the Revo- 
lution, Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation in 
a country retirement, but at this crisis he came secretly forward to 
bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the King. His counsel was 
to recognize practically the new power of the Commons by choosing 
the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among the members of 
the party which was strongest in the Lower House. As yet no 
Ministry, in the modern sense of the term, had existed. Each great 
ofiicer of state. Treasurer, or Secretary, or Lord Privy Seal, had in 
theory been independent of his fellow-officers ; each was the " King's 
servant " and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the 
King alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might 
tower above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course 
of government, but the predominance was merely personal and never 
permanent ; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were 
ready to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed 
them. It was common for a King to choose or dismiss a single 



682 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Minister without any communication with the rest ; and so far from 
aiming at ministerial unity, even WiUiam had striven to reproduce 
in the Cabinet itself the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. 
Sunderland's plan aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by 
a homogeneous Ministry, chosen from the same party, representing 
the same sentiments, and bound together for common action by 
a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the party to which it 
belonged. Not only would such a plan secure a unity of adminis- 
tration which had been unknown till then, but it gave an organiza- 
tion to the House of Commons which it had never had before. The 
Ministers who were representatives of the majority of its members 
became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions were drawn 
together into the two great parties which supported or opposed the 
Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the simplest 
possible way the solution of the problem which had so long vexed both 
King and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name to 
be the King's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee 
representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and 
capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar 
Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from one side of the 
House to the other. 

Such was the origin of that system of representative government 
which has gone on from Sunderland's day to our own. But though 
WiUiam showed his own political genius in understanding and 
adopting Sunderland's plan, it was only slowly and tentatively that he 
ventured to carry it out in practice. In spite of the temporary reaction 
Sunderland believed that the balance of political power was really on 
the side of the Whigs. Not only were they the natural representatives 
of the principles of the Revolution, and the supporters of the war, but 
they stood far above their opponents in parliamentary and adminis- 
trative talent. At their head stood a group of statesmen, whose close 
union in thought and action gained them the name of the Junto. 
Russell, as yet the most prominent of these, was the victor of La 
Hogue ; Somers was a young advocate who had sprung into fame by 
his defence of the Seven Bishops ; Lord Wharton was known as the 
most dexterous and unscrupulous of party managers ; and Montague 
was fast making a reputation as the ablest of English financiers. In 
spite of such considerations, however, it is doubtful whether William 
would have thrown himself into the hands of a purely W' hig Ministry 
but for the attitude which the Tories took towards the war. In spite 
of the exhaustion of France the war still languished and the alHes still 
failed to win a single victory. Meanwhile English trade was all but 
ruined by the French privateers, and the nation stood aghast at tne 
growth of taxation. The Tories, always cold in their support of the 
Grand Alliance, now became eager for peace. The Whigs, on the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



683 



1689> 
1694. 

1695. 



other hand, remained resolute in their support of the war. WiUiam, j Sec. viii. 
in whose mind the contest with France was the first object, was thus ' the'^ane 
driven slowly to follow Sunderland's advice. In 1695 he dissolved Alliance 
ParHameht, and the Whig tone of the new House of Commons 
enabled him to replace his Tory Ministers by the members of the , 
Junto. Russell went to the Admiralty, Somers was named Lord i 
Keeper, Montague Chancellor of the Exchequer, Shrewsbury Secretary j 
of State. The changes were gradually made, but they had hardly ! 
begun when their effect was felt. The House of Commons took a new , 
tone. The Whig majority of its members, united and disciplined, moved | 
quietly under the direction of their leaders, the new Ministers of the j 
Crown. Great measures, financial and constitutional, passed rapidly ; 
through Parliament. The Triennial Bill became law. In spite of the ! 
efforts of the Lords, the Commons refused to renew the bill for the j 
censorship of the press, and its liberty was no sooner thus recognized j 
33 legal (1695), than the recognition was at once followed by the j 
appearance of a crowd of public prints. To meet the financial strain | 
of the war Montague established the Bank of England (1694) by 
I adopting the plan which Paterson, a Scotch adventurer, had brought 
forward for the creation of a National Bank. The subscribers to a 
I loan of 1,200,000/. were formed into a Company, with no exclusive 
privileges, and restricted by law from lending money to the Crown 
I without consent of Parliament ; but so great had been the growth of 
the national wealth that in ten days the list of subscribers was full. 
A new source of power revealed itself in the discovery of the resources 
afforded by the national credit ; and the rapid growth of the National 
Debt gave a new security against the return of the Stuarts, whose 
ifirst work would have been the repudiation of it. With even greater 
icourage and hardly less originality Montague faced the great difficulty 
lof the debasement of the coinage and carried out its reform. The 
ipower of the new administration, the evidence of the public credit, 
gave strength to William abroad as at home. In 1695 the Alliance 
isucceeded for the first time in winning a great triumph over France 
in the capture of Namur. Even in the troubled year which followed 
^nd amidst the distress created by the reform of the currency, William 
Iwas able to hold the French at bay. But the war was fast drawing 
to a close. Lewis was simply fighting to secure more favourable 
terms, and William, though he held that " the only way of treating 
with France is with our swords in our hands," was almost as eager as j 
Lewis for a peace which would leave him free to deal with a question 
which the health of the King of Spain now brought every day closer, < 
the question of the succession to the Spanish throne. The obstacles ! 
which were thrown in the way of an accommodation by Spain and i 
jlthe Empire were set aside by a private negotiation between William : 
|and Lewis, and the year 1697 saw the conclusion of the Peace of i 



1697. 



684 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Ryswick. In spite of failure and defeat in the field William's policy 
had won. The victories of France remained barren in the face of a 
united Europe ; and her exhaustion forced her, for the first time 
since Richelieu's day, to consent to a disadvantageous peace. The 
Empjre was satisfied by the withdrawal of France from every annex- 
ation, save that of Strasbourg, which she had made since the Treaty 
of Nimeguen. To Spain Lewis restored Luxemburg and all the 
conquests he had made during the war in the Netherlands. The 
Duke of Lorraine was replaced in his dominions. What was a far, 
heavier humiliation to Lewis personally was his abandonment of the. 
Stuart cause and his recognition of William as King of England. \ 
The Peace of Ryswick was thus the final and decisive defeat of the ' 
conspiracy which had gone on between Lewis and the Stuarts ever' 
since the Treaty of Dover, the conspiracy to turn England into a 
Roman Catholic country and into a dependency of France. 



Section IX.— Marlborough. 1698—1712. 

{Authorities. — Lord Macaulay's great work, which practically ends at the 
Peace of Ryswick, has been continued by Lord Stanhope ("History of 
England under Queen Anne ") during this period. For Marlborough himself 
the main authority must be the Duke's biography by Archdeacon Coxe, with 
his Despatches. The French side of the war and negotiations has been carefully 
given by M. Martin (** Histoire de France ") in what is the most accurate and 
judicious portion of his work. Swift's political tracts and Bolingbroke's cor- 
respondence are of great importance for the latter part of this period. ] 



What had bowed the pride of Lewis to the humiliating terms of the 
Peace of Ryswick was not so much the exhaustion of France as the 
need of preparing for a new and greater struggle. The death of the 
King of Spain, Charles the Second, was known to be at hand ; and 
with him ended the male line of the Austrian princes, who for two 
hundred years had occupied the Spanish throne. How strangely 
Spain had fallen from its high estate in Europe the wars of Lewis had 
abundantly shown, but so vast was the extent of its empire, so 
enormous the resources which still remained to it, that imder a 
vigorous ruler men believed its old power would at once return. Its 
sovereign was still master of some of the noblest provinces of the 
Old World and the New, of Spain itself, of the Milanese, of Naples 
and Sicily, of the Netherlands, of Southern America, of the noble 
islands of the Spanish Main. To add such a dominion as this to the 
dominion either of Lewis or of the Emperor would be to undo at a 
blow the work of European independence which William had wrought ; 
and it was with a view to prevent either of these results that William 



rx.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



685 



freed his hands by the Peace of Ryswick. At this moment the 
claimants of the Spanish succession were three : the Dauphin, a son 
of the Spanish King's elder sister ; the Electoral Prince of Bavaria, a 
grandson of his younger sister ; and the Emperor, who was a son of 
Charles's aunt. In strict law — if there had been any law really applic- 
able to the matter — the claim of the last was the stronger of the 1 
three ; for the claim of the Dauphin was barred by an express renun- ' 
elation of all right to the succession at his mother's marriage with i 
Lewis XIV., a renunciation which had been ratified at the Treaty of | 
the Pyrenees ; and a similar renunciation barred the claim of the j 
Bavarian candidate. The claim of the Emperor was more remote in I 
blood, but it was barred by no renunciation at all. William however , 
was as resolute in the interests of Europe to repulse the claim of the 
Emperor as to repulse that of Lewis ; and it was the consciousness that 
the Austrian succession was inevitable if the war continued and Spain 
remained a member of the Grand Alliance, in arms against France 
and leagued with the Emperor, which made him suddenly conclude the 
Peace of Ryswick. Had England and Holland shared William's 
temper he would have insisted on the succession of the Electoral 
Prince to the whole Spanish dominions. But both were weary of war. 
In England the peace was a.t once followed by the reduction of the 
army at the demand of the House of Commons to ten thousand men ; 
and a clamour had already begun for the disbanding even of these. 
It was necessary to bribe the two rival claimants to a waiver of their 
claims, and by the First Partition Treaty, concluded .in 1698, between 
England, Holland, and France, the succession of the Electoral Prince 
was recognized on condition of the cession by Spain of its Italian 
possessions to his two rivals. The Milanese would thus pass to the 
Emperor, the Two Sicilies with the border province of Guipuscoa to 
France. But the arrangement was hardly concluded when the death 
of the Bavarian prince made the Treaty waste paper. Austria and 
France were left face to face, and a terrible struggle, in which the 
success of either would be equally fatal to the independence of Europe, 
seemed unavoidable. The peril was greater that the temper of 
England left William without the means of backing his policy by arms. 
The suffering which the war had caused to the merchant class and the 
pressure of the debt and taxation it entailed were waking every day a 
more bitter resentment in the people, and the general discontent 
avenged itself on William and the party who had backed his policy. 
The King's prodigal grants of crown lands to his Dutch favourites, 
his cold and sullen demeanour, his endeavour to maintain the standing 
army, robbed him of whatever popularity he still retained. The Whig 
Junto lost hold on the Commons. Montague was driven from his 
post, Somers was unscrupulously attacked, and even the boldest Whigs 
shrank from accepting office. William's earnest entreaty could not 



Sec. IX. 

Marl- 
borough. 
1698- 
1712. 



1698. 



6«6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



I 



1 



turn the Parliament from its resolve to send his Dutch guards out oi 
the country, and to reduce the army from ten thousand men to seven. 
The navy, which had numbered forty thousand sailors during the war, 
was at the same time cut down to eight. How much William's handsl 
were weakened by this peace-temper of England was shown by the 
Second Partition Treaty which was concluded in 1700 between the 
three powers. By this, in spite of the protests of the Emperor, who 
refused to join in the Treaty or to surrender his claim to the whole 
Spanish monarchy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Indies were 
assigned to his second son the Archduke Charles of Austria. But the 
compensation granted to France was now increased. To the Two 
Sicilies was added the Duchy of Lorraine, whose Duke was trknsferred 
to the Milanese. If the Emperor still persisted in his refusal to com^j 
into the Treaty, his share was to pass to another unnamed prince, who 
was probably the Duke of Savoy. 

The Emperor still protested, but his protest was of little moment so 
long as Lewis and the two maritime powers held firmly together. Noh 
was the bitter resentment of Spain of more avail. The Spaniards^ 
cared little whether a French or an Austrian prince sat on the thronef 
of Charles the Second, but their pride revolted against the dismember-? 
ment of the monarchy by the loss of its Italian dependencies. Even 
the miserable King shared the anger of his subjects, and a will wrested 
f^om him by the factions which wrangled over his death-bed bequeathed 
the vhole monarchy of Spain to a grandson of Lewis, the Duke of 
Anjou, the second son of the Dauphin. The Treaty of Partition was 
so recent, and the risk of accepting this bequest so great, that Lewis 
would hardly have resolved on it but for his belief that the temper of 
England must necessarily render William's opposition a fruitless one. 
Never in fact had England been so averse from war. So strong was 
the antipathy to William's foreign policy that men openly approved 
of what Lewis had done. Hardly anyone in England dreaded the 
succession of a boy who, French as he was, would as they believed 
soon be turned into a Spaniard by the natural course of events. The 
succession of the Duke of Anjou was generally looked upon as far 
better than the increase of power which France would have derived 
from the cessions of the last Treaty of Partition, cessions which would 
have turned the Mediterranean, it was said, into a French lake. " It 
grieves me to the heart," William wrote bitterly, " that almost everyone 
rejoices that France has preferred the will to the Treaty." Astonished 
and angered as he was at his rival's breach of faith, he had no means 
of punishing it. In 1 701 the Duke of Anjou peaceably entered 
Madrid, and Lewis proudly boasted that henceforth there were no 
Pyrenees. The hfe-work of William seemed undone. He knew him- 
self to be dying. His cough was incessant, his eyes sunk and dead, 
his frame so weak that he'could hardly get into his coach. But never 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



687 



had he shown himself so great. His courage rose with every difficulty. ! Sec. IX. 
His temper grew cooler and more serene with every insult. His large : 
and clear-sighted intellect looked through the temporary embarrassments \ 
of French diplomacy and English faction to the great interests which 
would in the end determine the course of European politics. Abroad 
and at home all seemed to go against him. For the moment he had no 
ally save Holland, for Spain was now united with Lewis, and the 
Elector of Bavaria, who held charge of the Spanish Netherlands and 
on whom William had counted, joined the French side and proclaimed 
the Duke of Anjou as King in Brussels. The attitude of Bavaria \ 
divided Germany and held the House of Austria in check. In 
England the new Parliament was crowded with Tories who were 
resolute against war, and William was forced in 1701 to name a Tory 
Ministry with Lord Godolphin at its head, which pressed him to 
acknowledge the new King of Spain. As even Holland did this, 
William was forced to submit. He could only count on France to 
help him, and he did not count in vain. Bitter as the strife of Whig 
aad Tory might be in England, there were two things on which Whig 
and Tory were agreed. Neither would suffer France to occupy the 
Netherlands. Neither would endure a French attack on the Protes- 
tant succession which the Revolution of 1688 had established. But the 
greed of Lewis Winded him to the need of moderation in this hour of 
good-luck. The Spanish garrisons in the Netherlands were weak, and 
in the name of his grandson he introduced French troops into town 
after town. The English Parliament at once acquiesced in William^s 
demand for their withdrawal ; but the demand was haughtily rejected. 
Holland, fearful of invasion as the French troops gathered on her 
frontier, appealed to England for aid, and the Tory party in the ' 
Parliament saw with helpless rage that they were silently drifting into j 
war. They impeached the leading members of the Junto for their i 
share in the Partition Treaties ; they insulted William, and delayed the 
supplies. But outside the House of Commons the tide of national 
feeling rose as the designs of Lewis grew clearer and a great French fleet 
gathered in the Channel. Its aim was revealed by the disclosure of a 
fresh Jacobite Plot, the proofs of which were laid before Parliament. 
Even the House of Commons took fire. The fleet was raised to 
thirty thousand men, the army to ten thousand, and Kent sent up a 
remonstrance against the factious measures by which the Tories still 
struggled against the King's policy, and a prayer "that addresses 
might be turned into Bills of Supply." WilHam was encouraged by 
these signs of a change of temper to despatch an Englibh force to 
Holland, and to conclude a secret treaty with Holland and the Empire 
for the recovery of the Netherlands from France, and of the Sicilies 
and Milanese from Spain. But England at large was still chnging 
desperately to peace, when Lewis by a sudden act forced it into 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOILE. 



[Chap. 



war. He had acknowledged William as King in the Peace of 
Ryswick, and pledged himself to oppose all attacks on his throne. 
He now entered the bed-chamber at St. Germains where James 
was breathing his last, and promised to acknowledge his son at 
his death as King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The promise 
was in fact a declaration of war, and in a moment all England was at 
one in accepting the challenge. The issue Lewis had raised was no 
longer a matter of European poHtics, but the question whether the work 
of the Revolution should be undone, and whether Catholicism and 
despotism should be replaced on the throne of England by the arms ot 
France. On such a question as this there was no difference between 
Tory and Whig. Not a word of protest had been uttered when the 
death of the last living child of the Princess Anne was followed in 
1701 by the passing of an Act of' Settlement which, setting aside not 
only the pretended Prince of Wales and a younger daughter of James 
the Second, but the Duchess of Savoy, a daughter of Henrietta of 
Orleans, and other claimants nearer in blood, as disqualified by their 
profession of the Catholic religion, vested the right to the crown in 
Sophia, Electress-Dowager of Hanover, a child of the Queen of 
Bohemia and a granddaughter of James the First, and the heirs of her 
body, being Protestants. The same national union showed itself in 
the King's welcome on his return from the Hague, where the conclusion 
of a new Grand Alliance between the Empire, Holland, and the United 
Provinces, had rewarded William's patience and skill. The AUiance 
was soon joined by Denmark, Sweden, the Palatinate, and the bulk 
of the German States. The Parliament which William summoned in 
1702, though still Toiy in the main, replied to his stirring appeal by 
voting forty thousand men for the war. 

But the King's weakness was already too great to allow of his taking 
the field ; and he was forced to entrust the war in the Netherlands to 
the one Englishman who had shown himself capable of- a great com- 
mand. John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough, was born in 1650, the 
son of a Devonshire Cavalier, whose daughter became at the Restora- 
tion mistress of the Duke of York. The shame of Arabella did more 
perhaps than her father's loyalty to win for her brother a commission 
in the Royal Guards ; and after five years' service abroad under 
Turenne the young captain became colonel of an English regiment 
which was retained in the service of France. He had already shown 
some of the qualities of a great soldier, an unruffled courage, a bold 
and venturous temper held in check by a cool and serene judgment^ 
a vigilance and capacity for enduring fatigue which never forsook him. 
In later years he was known to spend a whole day in reconnoitring, 
and at Blenheim he remained on horseback for fifteen hours. But 
courage and skill in arms did less for Churchill on his return to the 
English court than his personal beauty. In the French camp he had 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



689 



been known as " the handsome Englishman ; " and his manners were 
as winning as his person. Even in age his address was almost 
irresistible : " he engrossed the graces," says Chesterfield ; and his 
air never lost the indolent sweetness which won the favour of Lady 
Castlemaine. A present of ;z^5,ooo from the King^s mistress laid the 
foundation of a fortune which grew rapidly to greatness, as the prudent 
forethought of the handsome young soldier hardened into the avarice 
of age. But it was to the Duke of York that Churchill looked for 
advancement, and he earned it by the fidelity with which as a member 
of his household he clung to the Duke's fortunes during the dark days 
of the Plot. He followed James to Edinburgh and the Hague, and 
was raised to the peerage on his return and rewarded with the 
colonelcy of the Royal Life Guards. The service he rendered his 
master after his accession by saving the Royal army from a surprise 
at Sedgemoor would have been yet more splendidly acknowledged 
but for the King's bigotry. In spite of his master's personal solici- 
tations Churchill remained true to Protestantism. But he knew James 
too well to count on further favour ; and no sentiment of gratitude 
hindered him from corresponding with the Prince of Orange, and 
planning a mutiny in the army gathered to oppose him which would 
have brought the King a prisoner into the Prince's camp. His plot 
broke down, but his desertion proved fatal to the Royal cause ; and 
the service which he had rendered to William, base ate it was, was too 
priceless to miss its reward. Churchill became Earl of Marlborough , 
he was put at the head of a force during the Irish war, where his rapid 
successes at once won William's regard ; and he was given high 
command in the army of Flanders. But the treason which Marl- 
borough had plotted against James was as nothing when compared 
to the treason which he soon plotted against Wilham. Great as was 
his greed of gold, he had married Sarah Jennings, a penniless beauty 
of Charles's court, in whom a violent and malignant temper was 
strangely combined with a power of winning and retaining love, 
Marlborough's affection for her ran like a thread of gold through the 
dark web of his career. In the midst of his marches and from the 
very battle-field he writes to his wife with the same passionate tender- 
ness. The composure which no danger or hatred could rufile broke 
down into almost womanish depression at the thought of her coldness 
or at any burst of her violent humour. He never left her without a 
pang. " I did for a great while with a perspective glass look upon the 
cliffs," he once wrote to her after setting out on a campaign, "in 
hopes that I might have had one sight of you." It was no wonder 
that the woman who inspired Marlborough with a love like this bound 
to her the weak and feeble nature of the Princess Anne. The two 
friends threw off the restraints of state, and addressed each other as 
" Mrs. Freeman " and "Mrs. Morley," It was through the influence 

y Y 



690 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



of his wife that Churchill induced Anne to desert her father at the 
Revolution ; and it was on the same influence that his ambition counted 
in its designs against William. His plan was simply to drive the 
King from the throne by backing the Tories in their opposition to 
the war as well as by stirring to frenzy the English hatred of foreigners, 
and to seat Anne in his place. The discovery of his designs roused 
the King to a burst of unusual resentment. " Were I and my Lord 
Marlborough private persons," William exclaimed, " the sword would 
have to settle between us." As it was, he could only strip the Earl of 
his offices and command, and drive his wife from St. James's. Anne 
followed her favourite, and the court of the Princess became the 
centre of the Tory opposition : while Marlborough opened a corre- 
spondence with James, and went far beyond his fellow-traitors in 
baseness by revealing to him, and through him to France, the war- 
projects of the English Cabinet. 

The death of Mary forced William to recall Anne, who had now 
become his successor ; and with Anne the Marlboroughs returned to 
court. The King could not bend himself to trust the Earl again ; but 
as death drew near he saw in him the one man whose splendid talents 
fitted him, in spite of the baseness and treason of his life, to rule 
England and direct the Grand Alliance in his stead. He put Marl- 
borough at the head of the army in Flanders, but the Earl had only 
just taken the command when, on the 20th of February, 1 702, a fall 
from his horse proved fatal to the broken frame of the King. " There 
was a time when I should have been glad to have been delivered out 
of my troubles," the dying man whispered to Portland, " but I own 1 
see another scene, and could wish to live a little longer." He knew, 
however, that the wish was vain, and commended Marlborough to 
Anne as the fittest person to lead her armies and guide her counsels. 
Anne's zeal needed no quickening. Three days after her accession on 
the 8th of March, the Earl was named Captain- General of the English 
forces at home and abroad, and entrusted with the entire direction 
of the war. His supremacy over home affairs was secured by the 
elevation of Lord Godolphin, a skilled financier, and a close friend 
of Marlborough's, to the post of Lord Treasurer. The Queen's affec- 
tion for his wife ensured him the support of the Crown at a moment 
when Anne's personal popularity gave the Crown a new weight with 
the nation. In England, indeed, party feeling for the moment died 
away. The Tories were won over to the war now that it was waged by 
a Tory general, and the Whigs were ready to back even a Tory general 
in waging a Whig war. Abroad William's death shook the Grand 
Alliance to its base ; and even Holland wavered in dread of being 
deserted by England in the coming struggle. But the decision oi 
Marlborough soon did away with this distrust. Anne was made to 
declare from the throne her resolve to pursue with energy the 



ix.i 



THE REVOLUTION, 



691 



policy of her predecessor. The Tory Parhament was brought to 
sanction vigorous measures for the prosecution of the war. The 
new general hastened to the Hague, received the command of the 
Dutch as well as of the English forces, and drew the German 
powers into the Confederacy with a skill and adroitness which even 
William might have envied. Never was greatness more quickly 
recognized than in the case of Marlborough. In a few months he 
was regarded by all as the guiding spiiit of the Alliance, and 
princes whose jealousy had worn out the patience of William 
yielded without a struggle to the counsels of his successor. The 
temper, indeed, of Marlborough fitted him in an especial way to be 
the head of a great confederacy. Like William, he owed little of 
his power to any early training. The trace of his neglected education 
was seen to the last in his reluctance to write. " Of all things," he said 
to his wife, " 1 do not love writing." To pen a despatch indeed was 
a far greater trouble to him than to plan a campaign. But nature had 
given him qualities which in other men spring specially from culture. 
His capacity for business was immense. During the next ten years 
lie assumed the general direction of the war in Flanders and in Spain. 
He managed every negotiation with the courts of the allies. He 
watched over the shifting phases of English politics. He had to 
cross the Channel to win over Anne to a change in the Cabinet, or 
to hurry to Berlin to secure the due contingent of Electoral troops 
from Brandenburg. At the same moment he was reconciling the 
Emperor with the Protestants of Hungary, stirring the Calvinists of- 
the Cevennes into revolt, arranging the affairs of Portugal, and pro- 
viding for the protection of the Duke of Savoy. But his air showed 
no trace of fatigue or haste or vexation. He retained to the last the 
indolent grace of his youth. His natural dignity was never ruffled by 
an outbreak of temper. Amidst the storm of battle men saw him, 
" without fear of danger or in the least hurry, giving his orders with 
all the calmness imaginable." In the cabinet he was as cool as on 
the battle-field. He met with the same equable serenity the pettiness 
of the German princes, the phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant oppo- 
sition of his officers, the libels of his political opponents. There was a 
touch of irony in the simple expedients by which he sometimes solved 
problems which had baffled Cabinets. The King of Prussia was 
one of the most vexatious among the aUies, but all difficulty with him 
ceased when Marlborough rose at a state banquet and handed to him 
a napkin. Churchiirs composure rested partly indeed on a pride which 
could not stoop to bare the real self within to the eyes of meaner 
men. In the bitter moments before his fall he bade Godolphin burn 
some querulous letters which the persecution of his opponents had wrung 
from him. " My desire is that the world may continue in their error 
of thinking me a happy man, for I think it better to be envied than 

Y Y 2 



692 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap, 



pitied." But in great measure it sprang from the purely intellectual 
temper of his mind. His passion for his wife was the one sentiment 
which tinged the colourless light in which his understanding moved. 
In all else he was without love or hate, he knew neither doubt nor 
regret. In private life he was a humane aiid compassionate man ; but 
if his position required it he could betray Englishmen to death in his 
negotiations with St. Germains, or lead his army to a butchery such 
as that of Malplaquet. Of honour or the finer sentiments of mankind 
he knew nothing ; and he turned without a shock from guiding Europe 
and winning great victories to heap up a matchless fortune by peculation 
and greed. He is perhaps the only instance of a man of real greatness 
who loved money for money's sake. The passions which stirred the 
men around him, whether noble or ignoble, were to him simply elements 
in an intellectual problem which had to be solved by patience. " Patience 
will overcome all things," he writes again and again. " As I think most 
things are governed by destiny, having done all things we should 
submit with patience." 

As a statesman the high qualities of Marlborough were owned by 
his bitterest foes. " Over the Confederacy," says Bolingbroke, " he, a 
new, a private man, acquired by merit and management a more 
decided influence than high birth, confirmed authority, and even the 
crown of Great Britain, had given to King William." But great as he 
was V!X the council, he was even greater in the field. He stands alone 
amongst the masters of the art of war as a captain whose victories 
began at an age when the work of most men is done. Though he 
served as a young officer under Turenne and for a few months in 
Ireland and the Netherlands, he had held no great command till he 
took the field in Flanders at the age of fifty-two. He stands alone, 
too, in his unbroken good fortune. Voltaire notes that he never 
besieged a fortress which he did not take, or fought a battle which he 
did not win. His difficulties came not from the enemy, but from the 
ignorance and timidity of his own allies. He was never defeated in 
the field, but victory after victory was snatched from him by the inca- 
pacity of his officers or the stubbornness of the Dutch. What startled 
the cautious strategists of his day was the vigour and audacity of his 
plans. Old as he was, Marlborough's designs had from the first all 
the dash and boldness of youth. On taking the field in 1702 he at once 
resolved to force a battle in the heart of Brabant. The plan was foiled 
by the timidity of the Dutch deputies, but his resolute advance across 
the Meuse drew the French forces from that river and enabled him to 
reduce fortress after fortress in a series of sieges. The surrender oi 
Lidge closed a campaign which cut off the French from the Lower 
Rhine and freed Holland from all danger of an invasion. The successes 
of Marlborough had l)een brought into bolder relief by the fortunes of 
the war in other quarters. In Italy Prince Eugene of Savoy showed 



IX.J 



THE REVOLUTION. 



693 



his powers by a surprise of the French army at Cremona, but no real 
successes had been won. An EngHsh descent on the Spanish coast 
ended in failure. In Germany the Bavarians joined the French, and 
the united armies defeated the forces of the Empire. It was in this 
quarter that Lewis resolved to push his fortunes. In the spring of 1703 
a fresh army under Marshal Villars again relieved the Elector from 
the pressure of the Imperial armies, and only a strife which arose 
between the two commanders hindered the joint armies from marching 
on Vienna. Meanwhile the timidity of the Dutch deputies served 
Lewis well in the Low Countries. Marlborough had been created 
Duke, and munificently rewarded for his services in the previous year, 
but his hopes in this second campaign were foiled by the deputies of 
the States- General. Serene as his temper was, it broke down before 
their refusal to co-operate in an attack on Antwerp and French 
Flanders ; and the prayers of Godolphin and of the pensionary 
Heinsius alone induced him to withdraw his offer of resignation. But 
in spite of victories on the Danube, the blunders of his adversaries 
on the Rhine, and the sudden aid of an insurrection which broke out 
in Hungary, the difficulties of Lewis were hourly increasing. The 
accession of Savoy to the Grand Alliance threatened his armies in 
Italy with destruction. That of Portugal gave the allies a base of 
operations against Spain. His energy however rose with the pressure, 
and while the Duke of Berwick, a natural son of James the Second, 
was despatched against Portugal, three small armies closed round 
Savoy. The flower of the French troops joined the army of Bavaria 
on the Danube, for the bold plan of Lewis was to decide the fortunes 
of the war by a victory which would wrest peace from the Empire 
under the walls of Vienna. 

The master-stroke of Lewis roused Marlborough at the opening of 
1704 to a master-stroke in return ; but the secresy and boldness of the 
Duke's plans deceived both his enemies and his allies. The French 
army in Flanders saw in his march upon Maintz only a transfer of the 
war into Elsass. The Dutch were lured into suffering their troops to 
be drawn as far from Flanders as Coblentz by proposals of a campaign 
on the Moselle. It was only when Marlborough crossed the Neckar 
and struck through the heart of Germany for the Danube that the true 
aim of his operations was revealed. After struggling through the hill 
country of Wiirtemberg, he joined the Imperial army under the Prince 
of Baden, stormed the heigjits of Donauworth, crossed the Danube 
and the Lech, and penetrated into the heart of Bavaria. The crisis 
drew the two armies which were facing one another on the Upper 
Rhine to the scene. The arrival of Marshal Tallard with thirty thou- 
sand French troops saved the Elector of Bavaria for the moment from 
the need of submission ; but the junction of his opponent, Prince 
Eugene, with Marlborough raised the contending forces again to an 



694 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



equality, and after a few marches the armies met on the north bank of 
the Danube, near the little town of Hochstadt and the village of 
Blindheim or Blenheim, which have given their names to the battle. 
In one respect the struggle which followed stands almost unrivalled in 
history, for the whole of the Teutonic race was represented in the strange 
medley of Englishmen, Dutchmen, Hanoverians, Danes, Wiirtem- 
bergers and Austrians who followed Marlborough and Eugene. The 
. French and Bavarians, who numbered like their opponents some fifty 
thousand men, lay behind a little stream which ran through swampy 
ground to the Danube. The position was a strong one, for its front 
was covered by the swamp, its right by the Danube, its left by the hill- 
country in which the stream rose, and Tallard had not only entrenched 
himself, but was far superior to his rival in artillery. But for once 
Marlborough's hands were free. " I have great reason,'' he wrote calmly 
home, " to hope that everything will go well, for I have the pleasure to 
find all the officers willing to obey without knowing any other reason 
than that it is my desire, which is very different from what it was in 
Flanders, where I was obliged to have the consent of a council of war 
for everything I undertook.'' So formidable were the obstacles, how- 
ever, that though the allies were in motion at sunrise on the 13th of 
August, it was not till midday that Eugene, who commanded on the 
right, succeeded in crossing the stream. The English foot at once 
forded it on the left and attacked the village of Blindheim in which the 
bulk of the French infantry were entrenched, but after a furious struggle 
the attack was repulsed, while as gallant a resistance at the other end 
of the line held Eugene in check. The centre, however, which the 
French believed to be unassailable, had been chosen by Marlborough 
for the chief point of attack, and by making an artificial road across 
the morass he was at last enabled to throw his eight thousand horsemen 
on the French horse which lay covered by it. Two desperate charges 
which the Duke headed in person decided the day. The French centre 
was flung back on the Danube and forced to surrender. Their left fell 
back in confusion on Hochstadt : their right, cooped up in Blindheim 
and cut off from retreat, became prisoners of war. Of the defeated army 
only twenty thousand escaped. Twelve thousand were slain, fourteen 
thousand were captured. Germany was finally freed from the French ; 
and Marlborough, who followed the wreck of the French host in its 
flight to Elsass, soon made himself master of the Lower Moselle. But 
the loss of France could not be measured by men or fortresses. A 
hundred victories since Rocroi had taught the world to regard the 
French army as invincible, when Blenheim and the surrender of the 
flower of the French soldiery broke the spell. From that moment the 
terror of victory passed to the side of the allies, and "Malbrbok" 
became a name of fear to every child in France. 

In England itself the victory of Blenheim aided to bring about a 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



695 



great change in the pohtical aspect of affairs. ' With the progress of the 
struggle the Tory party had slowly drifted back again into its old 
antipathy to a " Whig war.'' Marlborough strove to bind them to hib 
pohcy by supporting in 1702 and 1703 a bill against occasional 
conformity, which excluded the Nonconformists yet more rigidly from 
all municipal rights, and by allowing the Queen to set aside the tenths 
and Mrst-fruits hitherto paid by the clergy to the Crown as a fund for 
the augmentation of small benefices. The fund still bears the name 
of Queen Anne's Bounty. But the bill against occasional conformity 
was steadily resisted by the Lords, and Marlborough's efforts to bend 
the Tory Ministers to a support of the war were every day more 
fruitless. The higher Tories with Lord Nottingham at their head, who 
had thrown every obstacle they could in the way of its continuance, at 
last quitted office in 1704, and Marlborough replaced them by Tories 
of a more moderate stamp who were still in favour of the war : by 
Robert Harley, who became Secretary of State, and Henry St. John, a 
man of splendid talents, who was named Secretary at War. The 
Duke's march into Germany embittered the political strife. The 
Tories and Jacobites threatened, it Marlborough failed, to bring his 
head to the block, and only the victory ot Blenheim saved him from 
political ruin. Slowly and against his will the Duke drifted from 
his own party to the party v/hich really backed his policy. He 
availed himself of the national triumph over Blenheim to dissolve 
Parliament ; the elections of 1705, as he hoped, returned a majority 
in favour of the war, and the efforts of Marlborough brought about a 
coalition between the Whig Junto and the moderate Tories who 
still clung to him, which foiled the bitter attacks of the peace party. 
The support of the Whigs was purchased by making a Whig, 
William Cowper, Lord Keeper, and sending Lord Sunderland 
as Envoy to Vienna Marlborough at last felt secure at home. 
But he had to bear disappointment abroad. His plan of attack 
along the line of the Moselle was defeated by the refusal of 
the Imperial army to join him. When he entered the French 
lines across the Dyle, the Dutch generals withdrew their troops ; 
and his proposal to attack the Duke of Villeroy in the field of 
Waterloo was rejected in full council of war by the deputies of the 
States with cries of " murder " and " massacre." Even Marlborough's 
composure broke into bitterness at the blow. " Had I had the same 
power I had last year," he wrote home, " I could have won a greater 
victory than that of Blenheim." On his complaint the States recalled 
their commissaries, but the year was lost ; nor had greater results been 
brought about in Italy or on the Rhine. The spirits of the allies were 
only sustained by the romantic exploits of Lord Peterborough in Spain. 
Profligate, unprincipled, flighty as he was, Peterborough had a genius 
for war, and his seizure of Barcelona with a handful of men, his 



696 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



recognition of the old liberties of Arragon, roused that province to 
support the cause of the second son of the Emperor, who had been 
acknowledged as King of Spain by the allies under the title of Charles 
the Third. Catalonia and Valentia soon joined Arragon in declaring 
for Charles : while Marlborough spent the winter of 1705 in negotia- 
tions at Vienna, Berlin, Hanover, and the Hague, and in preparations 
for the coming campaign. Eager for freedom of action and sick of 
the Imperial generals as of the Dutch, he planned a march over the 
Alps and a campaign in Italy ; and though his designs were defeated 
by the opposition of the allies, he found himself unfettered when he 
again appeared in Flanders in 1706. Villeroy was as eager as 
Marlborough for an engagement ; and the two armies met on the 
23rd of May at the village of Ramillies on the undulating plain which 
forms the highest ground in Brabant. The French were drawn up in 
a wide curve with morasses covering their front. After a feint on 
their left, Marlborough flung himself on their right wing at Ramillies, 
crushed it in a brilliant charge that he led in person, and swept along 
their whole line till it broke in a rout which only ended beneath the 
walls of Louvain. In an hour and a half the French had lost fifteen 
thousand men, their baggage, and their guns, and the line of the 
Scheldt, Brussels, Antwerp and Bruges were the prize of the victors. 
It only needed the four successful sieges which followed the battle of 
Ramillies to complete the deliverance of Flanders. 

The year which witnessed the victory of Ramillies remains yet more 
memorable as the year which witnessed the final Union of England 
with Scotland. As the undoing of the earlier union had been the first 
work of the Government of the Restoration, its revival was one of the 
first aims of the Government which followed the Revolution. But the 
project was long held in check by religious and commercial jealousies. 
Scotland refused to bear any part of the English debt. England 
would not yield any share in her monopoly of trade with the Colonies. 
The English Churchmen longed for a restoration of Episcopacy north 
of the border, while the Scotch Presbyterians would not hear even of 
the legal toleration of Episcopalians. In 1703, however, the Act of 
Settlement which passed through the Scotch Parliament at last 
brought home to English statesmen the dangers of further delay. In 
dealing with this measure the Scotch Whigs, who cared only for 
the independence of their country, joined hand in hand with the 
Scotch Jacobites, who looked only to the interests of the Pretender. 
The Jacobites excluded from the Act the name of the Princess 
Sophia ; the Whigs introduced a provision that no sovereign of 
England should be recognized as sovereign of Scotland save upon 
security given to the religion, freedom, and trade of the Scottish 
people. Great as the danger arising from such a measure undoubtedly 
was, for It pointed to a recognition of the Pretender in Scotland on the 



\ 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



697 



Queen's death, and such a recognition meant war between Scotland 
and England, it was only after three years' delay that the wisdom and 
resolution of Lord Somers brought the question to an issue. The 
Scotch proposals of a federative rather than a legislative union were 
set aside by his firmness ; the commercial, jealousies of the English 
traders were put by ; and the Act of Union as finally passed in 
1707 provided that the two kingdoms should be united into one under 
the name of Great Britain, and that the succession to the crown of 
this United Kingdom should be ruled by the provisions of the English 
Act of Settlement.., The Scotch Church and the Scotch Law were 
left untouched : but all rights of trade were thrown open, and a 
uniform system of coinage adopted. A single Parliament was hence- 
forth to represent the United Kingdom, and for this purpose forty-five 
Scotch members were added to the five hundred and thirteen English 
members of the House of Commons, and sixteen representative peers 
to the one hundred and eight who formed the English House of 
Lords. In Scotland the opposition was bitter and almost universal. 
The terror of the Presbyterians indeed was met by an Act of Security 
which became part of the Treaty of Union, and which required an 
oath to support the Presbyterian Church from every sovereign on his 
accession. But no securities could satisfy the enthusiastic patriots or 
the fanatical Cameronians. The Jacobites sought troops from France 
and plotted a Stuart restoration. The nationalists talked of seceding 
from the Assembly which voted for the Union, and of establishing 
a rival Parliament. In the end, however, good sense and the loyalty 
of the trading classes to the cause of the Protestant succession won 
their way. The measure was adopted by the Scotch Parliament, 
and the Treaty of Union became in 1707 a legislative Act to 
which Anne gave her assent in noble words. " I desire," said the 
Queen, *' and expect from my subjects of both nations that from hence- 
forth they act with all possible respect and kindness to one another, that 
so it may appear to all the world they have hearts disposed to become 
one people." Time has more than answered these hopes. The two 
nations whom the Union brought together have ever since remained 
one. England gained in the removal of a constant danger of treason 
and war. To Scotland the Union opened up new avenues of wealth 
which the energy of its people turned to wonderful account. The 
farms of Lothian have become models of agricultural skill. A fishing 
town on the Clyde has grown into the rich and populous Glasgow., 
Peace and culture have changed the wild clansmen of the Highlands 
into herdsmen and farmers. Nor was the change followed by any 
loss of national spirit. The world has hardly seen a mightier and 
more rapid development of national energy than that of Scotland after 
the Union. All that passed away was the jealousy which had parted 
since the days of Edward the First two peoples whom a common blood 



698 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



and common speech proclaimed to be one. The Union between 
Scotland and England has been real and stable simply because it 
was the legislative acknowledgment and enforcement of a national fact. 
With the defeat of Ramillies the fortunes of France reached their 
lowest ebb. The loss of Flanders was followed by the loss of Italy 
after a victory by which Eugene reheved Turin ; and not only did 
Peterborough hold his ground in Spain, but Charles the Third with an 
army of English and Portuguese entered Madrid. Marlborough was 
at the height of his renown. Ramillies gave him strength enough to 
force Anne, in spite of her hatred of the Whigs, to fulfil his compact 
with them by admitting Lord Sunderland, the bitterest leader of their 
party, to office. But the system of political balance which he had 
maintained till now was fast breaking down. Constitutionally, Marl- 
borough's was the last attempt to govern England on other terms than 
those of party government, and the union of parties to which he had 
clung ever since his severance from the extreme Tories soon became 
impossible. The growing opposition of the Tories to the war threw 
the Duke more and more on the support of the Whigs, and the Whigs 
sold their support dearly. Sunderland was resolved to drive the 
moderate Tories from the Administration in spite of Marlborough's 
desire to retain them. " England," the Duke wrote hotly, " will not 
be ruined because a few men are not pleased," but the opposition of 
the Tories to the war left him helpless in the hands of the only party 
who steadily supported it. A factious union of the Whigs with their 
opponents roused Marlborough to a burst of unusual passion in 
Parliament, but it effected its end by convincing him of the impos- 
sibility of further resistance. The resistance of the Queen indeed 
was stubborn and bitter. Anne was at heart a Tory, and her old 
trust in Marlborough died with his acceptance of the Whig demands. 
It was only by the threat of resignation that he had forced her to 
admit Sunderland to office. The violent outbreak of temper with 
which the Duchess enforced her husband's will changed the Queen's 
friendship for her into a bitter resentment. Marlborough however 
was forced to increase this resentment by fresh compliances with 
the Whig demands, by removing Peterborough from his command 
as a Tory general, and by wresting from Anne her consent in 
1708 to the dismissal of Harley and St. John from office, and 
the admission of Lord Somers and Wharton into the Ministry'. 
Somers became President of the Council, Wharton Lord-Lieutenant 
i of Ireland, and the Whig victory was complete. Meanwhile, the 
great struggle abroad was going on, with striking alternations of 
I success. France rose with singular rapidity from the crushing blow of 
I Ramillies. Spain was recovered for Philip by the victory of Marshal 
I Berwick at Almanza. Villars won fresh triumphs on the Rhine, and 
Eugene, who had penetrated into Provence, was driven back into 



IX.] 



THy. REVOLUTIClSr, 



699 



Italy. In Flanders, the plans of Marlborough were foiled by the 
strategy of the Duke of Vendome and by the reluctance of the Dutch, 
who were now wavering towards peace. In the campaign of 1708 
however, Vendome, though superior in fon^e, was attacked and defeated 
at Oudenarde, and though Marlborough was hindered from striking at 
the heart of France by the timidity of the English and Dutch states- 
men, he reduced Lille, the strongest of the frontier fortresses, in the 
face of an army of relief which numbered a hundred thousand men. 
The pride of Lewis was at last broken by defeat and by the terrible 
suffering of France. He offered terms of peace which yielded all that 
the allies had fought for. He consented to withdraw his aid from 
Philip of Spain, to give up ten Flemish fortresses to the Dutch, and to 
surrender to the Empire all that France had gained since the treaty of 
Westphalia. He offered to acknowledge Anne, to banish the Pretender 
from his dominions, and to demolish the fortifications of Dunkirk, 
a port hateful to England as the home of the French privateers. 

To Marlborough peace now seemed secure, but in spite of his 
counsels, the allies and the Whig Ministers in England demanded 
that Lewis should with his own troops compel his grandson to give up 
the crown of Spain. " If I must wage war," replied the King, 
" I had rather wage it against my enemies than against my children." 
At the opening of the campaign of 1709 he appealed to France, 
and France, exhausted as it was, answered nobly to his appeal. 
The terrible slaughter which bears the name of the battle of 
MalplagUJSt showed a new temper in the French soldiery. Starving as 
they were, they flung away their rations in their eagerness for the fight, 
and fell back at its close in serried masses that no efforts of 
Marlborough could break. They had lost twelve thousand men, but 
they had inflicted on the allies a loss of double that number. A 
*' deluge of blood " such as that of Malplaquet increased the growing 
weariness of the war, and the rejection of the French offers was unjustly 
attributed to a desire on the part of Marlborough of lengthening out a 
contest which brought him profit and power. The expulsion of Harley 
and St, John from the Ministry had given the Tories leaders of a more 
vigorous stamp, and St. John brought into play a new engine of political 
attack whose powers soon made themselves felt. In the Examifier 
and in a crowd of pamphlets and periodicals which followed in its train, 
the humour of Prior, the bitter irony of Swift, and St. John's own brilliant 
sophistry spent themselves on the abuse of the war and of its general. 
" Six millions of supphes and almost fifty millions of debt ! " 
Swift wrote bitterly, " The High Allies have been the ruin of us ! " 
Marlborough was ridiculed and reviled, he was accused of insolence, 
cruelty and ambition, of corruption and greed. Even his courage was 
called in question. A sudden storm of popular passion showed the 
way in which public opinion responded to these efforts. A High 



700 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Church divine, Dr. Sacheverell, maintained the doctrine of non- 
resistance in a sermon at St. PauFs with a boldness which deserved 
prosecution ; but in spite of the warning of Marlborough and of 
Somers the Whig Ministers resolved on his impeachment. His trial in 
17 ID at once widened into a great party struggle, and the popular 
enthusiasm in SacheverelFs favour showed the gathering hatred of 
the Whigs and the war. The most eminent of the Tory Churchmen 
stood by his side at the bar, crowds escorted him to the court and 
back again, while the streets rang with cries of "The Church and 
Dr. Sacheverell." A small majority of the peers found him guilty, 
but the light sentence they inflicted was in effect an acquittal, and 
bon-fires and illuminations over the whole country welcomed it as a 
Tory triumph. 

The turn of popular feeling freed Anne at once from the pressure 
beneath which she had bent : and the skill of Harley, whose cousin, 
Mrs. Masham, had succeeded the Duchess of Marlborough in the 
Queen's favour, was employed in bringing about the fall both of Marl- 
borough and the Whig Ministers by playing the one off against the other. 
The Whigs, who knew the Duke's alliance with them had simply been 
forced on him by the war, and were persuaded that the Queen had no 
aim but to humble him, looked coolly on at the dismissal of his son-in- 
law, Sunderland, and his friend, Godolphin. Marlborough, who leaned 
towards a reconciliation with his old party, looked on in return while 
Anne dismissed the Whig Ministers in the autumn of 17 10 and 
appointed a Tory Ministry in their place with Harley and St. John at 
its head. In the face of these changes, however, the Duke did not 
dare to encounter the risks of any decisive enterprise ; and his reduc- 
tion of a few sea-board towns failed to win back English feeling to the 
continuance of so costly a struggle. The return of a Tory House of 
Commons sealed his fate. His wife was dismissed from court. A 
masterly plan for a march into the heart of France in the opening of 
171 1 was foiled by the withdrawal of a part of his forces, and the 
negotiations which had for some time been conducted between the 
French and English Ministers without his knowledge marched rapidly 
to a close. The sense of approaching ruin forced Marlborough at 
last to break with the Tory Ministry, and his efforts induced the House 
of Lords to denounce the contemplated peace ; but the support of 
the Commons and the Queen, and the general hatred of the war 
among the people, enabled Harley to ride down all resistance. At 
the opening of 1712 the Whig majority in the House of Lords was 
swamped by the creation of twelve Tory peers. Marlborough was 
dismissed from his command, charged with peculation, and condemned 
as guilty by a vote of the House of Commons. He at once withdrew 
from England, and with his withdrawal all opposition to the peace 
1 was at an end. 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



701 



Section X.— Walpole. 1712—1742. 

{Authorities. — Coxe's Life of Sir Robert Walpole, Horace Walpole's 
Memoirs of the Reign of George II., and Lord Hervey's amusing Memoirs 
from the accession of George 11. to the death of Queen Caroline ; the poH- 
tical tracts, and especially the Letter to Sir William Wyndham and the Patriot ; 
King, of Bolinbroke, with the Bolinbroke Correspondence ; Swift's political ; 
writings, and his Journal to Stella. Horace Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace ' 
Mann' give a minute account of his father's fall. A sober and judicious account 
of the whole period may be found in Lord Stanhope's History of England 
from the Peace of Utrecht.] 



The struggle of the House of Lords under Marlborough's guidance 
against Harley and the Peace marks the close of the constitutional 
revolution which had been silently going on since the Restoration of 
the Stuarts. The defeat of the Peers and the fall of Marlborough 
which followed it announced that the transfer of political power to 
the House of Commons was complete. The machinery by which \ 
Sunderland had enabled it to direct the actual government of the \ 
country had been strengthened by the failure of Marlborough to 
restore the older system of administration : and the Ministers of the 
Crown have remained ever since an Executive Committee whose work 
is to carry out the will of the majority of its members. A recog- 
nition of this great change was seen in the series of "' Great Com- 
moners " who from this time became the rulers of England. The 
influence of political tradition, of wealth, and of the administrative 
training which their position often secures them, has at all times given 
places m the Ministry to members of the House of Lords, and a peer 
has sometimes figured as its nominal head. But the more natural 
arrangement has been the more common one ; and all the greater 
statesmen w^ho have guided the fortunes of England since Harley's 
day have been found in the Commons. Of these Great Commoners 
Robert Walpole was the first. Born in 1676, he entered Parliament two 
years before William's death a5 a yoting Norfolk landowner of fair for- 
tune, with the tastes and air of the class from which he sprang. His 
big square figure, his vulgar good-humoured face were those of a 
common country squire. And in Walpole the squire underlay the 
statesman to the last. He was ignorant of books, he " loved neither 
writing nor reading," and if he had a taste for art, his real love was for 
the table, the bottle, and the chase. He rode as hard as he drank. 
Even in moments of political peril, the first despatch he would open 
was the letter from his gamekeeper. There was the temper of the 
Norfolk fox-hunter in the '^ doggedness " which Marlborough noted as 
his characteristic, in the burly self-confidence which declared " If I 
had not been Prime Minister I should have been Archbishop of 
Canterbury," in the stubborn courage which conquered the awkwardn.^^^ 



702 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



of his earlier efforts to speak or met single-handed at the last the bitter 
attacks of a host of enemies, and above all in the genial good-humour 
which became with him a new force in politics. Walpole was the first 
Minister — it has been finely said — "who gave our government that 
character of lenity which it has since generally deserved." No man 
|v/as ever more fiercely attacked by speakers and writers, but he 
Wought in no " gagging Act " for the press ; and though the lives of 
most of his assailants were in his hands through their intrigues with the 
Pretender, he made no use of his power over them. Where his country 
breeding showed itself most, however, was in the shrewd, narrow, honest 
character of his mind. He saw very clearly, but he could not see far, 
and he would not believe what he could not see. He was thoroughly 
straightforward and true to his own convictions, so far as they went. 
" Robin and I are two honest men," the Jacobite Shippen owned in latei 
years, when contrasting him with his factious opponents : "he is for King 
George, and I am for King James ; but those men with long cravats 
only desire place, either under King George or King James." He saw 
the value of the political results which the Revolution had won, and he 
carried out his " Revolution principles '' with a rare fidelity through 
years of unquestioned power. But his prosaic good sense turned 
sceptically away from the poetic and passionate sides of human feeling. 
Appeals to the loftier or purer motives of action he laughed at as 
" school-boy flights." For young members who talked of public virtue 
or patriotism he had one good-natured answer : " You will soon come 
off that and grow wiser." 

How great a part Walpole was to play no one could as yet foresee. 
But even under Marlborough his practical abilities had brought him 
to the front. At the moment when the House of Commons was recog- 
nized as supreme, Walpole showed himself its ablest debater. Com- 
merce promised to become the main interest of England, and the 
merchants were already beginning to trust to his skill in finance. As 
a subordinate member of the Whig Ministry at the close of the war he 
gave signs of that administrative ability which forced his enemies to 
acknowledge that "he does everything with the same ease and tran- 
quillity as if he were doing nothing." How great was the sense ol 
his power was seen in the action of the triumphant Tories on Marl- 
borough's fall in 17 12. Walpole alone of their Whig opponents was 
singled out for persecution ; and a groundless charge of peculation 
sent him for a time to the Tower. The great work of the new Tory 
Ministry was to bring about a peace, and by the conclusion of a sepa- 
rate truce with France it at last forced all the members of the Alliance 
save the Emperor, who required the pressure of defeat, to consent in 
17 1 3 to the Treaty of Utrecht. In this treaty the original aim of the 
war was silently abandoned, and the principle of the earlier Treaties of 
Partition adopted in its stead, but with a provision that the crowns of 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



703 



France and Spain should never be united. Philip remained on the 
Spanish throne ; Spain ceded her possessions in Italy and the Nether- 
lands to Charles, who had now become Emperor, in satisfaction of his 
claims ; and handed over Sicily to the Duke of Savoy. Holland 
regained the right of placing garrisons in the strongest towns of the 
Netherlands as a barrier against France. England retained her 
conquests of Minorca and Gibraltar, which gave her command of the 
Mediterranean ; her resentment against the French privateers was 
satisfied by the dismantling of Dunkirk ; and Lewis recognized the 
right of Anne and the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover. 
The failure of the Queen's health made the succession the real question 
of the day, and it was a question which turned all politics into 
faction and intrigue. The Whigs, to secure the succession of the 
House of Hanover by the overthrow of the Tories, defeated a Treaty 
of Commerce in which Bolinbroke anticipated the greatest financial 
triumph of William Pitt by securing freedom of trade between England 
and France. The Ministry, on the other hand, in their anxiety to 
strengthen themselves by binding the Church to their side, pushed 
through the Houses a Schism Act, which forbade Dissenters to act as 
schoolmasters and tutors. But on the question of the Succession their 
course was as hesitating as that of the Queen, who hated the House 
of Hanover and hindered the Electoral Prince from coming over to 
secure the rights of his grandmother Sophia by taking his seat among 
the peers as Duke of Cambridge, but v/ho was too loyal to the Church 
to be brought into any real support of the Pretender. Harley, who had 
become Earl of Oxford, intrigued with both Hanover and St. Germains. 
St. John, however, who was raised to the peerage as Viscount Bolin- 
broke, saw tkat hesitation was no longer possible, and flung himself 
hotly, though secretly, into the Jacobite cause. As the crisis grew 
nearer, both parties prepared for civil war. In the beginning of 
1 7 14 the Whigs made ready for a rising on the Queen's death, and 
invited Marlborough from Flanders to head them, in the hope that his 
name would rally the army to their cause. Bolinbroke on the other hand 
ousted Harley from office, made the Jacobite Duke of Ormond Warden 
of the Cinque Ports, the district in which either claimant of the crown 
must land, and gave Scotland in charge to the Jacobite Earl of Mar. 
But events moved faster than his plans. On the 30th of July Anne 
was suddenly stnick with apoplexy ; and at the news the Whig Dukes 
of Argyll and Somerset entered the Privy Council without summons, 
and found their cause supported by the Duke of Shrewsbury, a member 
of the Tory Ministry, but an adherent of the House of Hanover. 
Shrewsbury was suggested by the Council and accepted by the dying 
Queen as Lord Treasurer. Four regiments were summoned to the 
capital, but the Jacobites were hopeless and unprepared, and the 
Elector George of Hanover, who had become heir to the throne on 



704 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the death of the Princess Sophia, was proclaimed as King without 
opposition. 

The accession of George I. in August 17 14 was followed by two 
striking political results. Under Anne the throne had regained much 
of the older influence which it lost through William's unpopu- 
larity. Under the two sovereigns who followed Anne the power of 
the Crown lay absolutely dormant. They were strangers, to whom 
loyalty in its personal sense was impossible ; and their character 
as nearly approached insignificance as it is possible for human 
character to approach it. Both were honest and straightforward 
men, who frankly accepted the irksome position of constitutional 
kings. But neither had any qualities which could make their honesty 
attractive to the people at large. The temper of the first was that 
of a gentleman usher ; and his one care was to get money for his 
favourites and himself. The temper of the second was that of a 
drill-sergeant, who beheved himself master of his realm while he 
repeated the lessons he had learnt from his wife and which his wife 
had learnt from the Minister. Their court is familiar enough in the 
witty memoirs of the time ; but as political figures the two Georges are 
simply absent from our history. England was governed by the Minis- 
ters of the Crown, and throughout the whole period these were mere 
representatives of a single political party. " The Tory party," B olinbroke 
wrote immediately after Anne's death, " is gone." It was B olinbroke 
more than any other man who had ruined the Tories by diverting them 
from any practical part in English politics to dreams of a Stuart restor- 
ation. The discovery of the Jacobite plots which had been nursed by the 
late Ministers of the Queen alienated the bulk of the landed gentry, who 
were still loyal to the Revolution, of the clergy, who dreaded a Catholic 
King, and of the trading classes, who shrank from the blow to public 
credit which a Jacobite repudiation of the debt would bring about. 
The cry of the York mob at the King's accession expressed tersely the 
creed of the English trader ; it shouted, " Liberty, Property, and No 
Pretender." The poHcy of Harley and Bolinbroke left the Whigs the 
only representatives of Revolution principles, of constitutional liberty 
and religious toleration, and when this was fairly seen, not only 
merchant and squire but the nation at large went with the Whigs'. 
In the House of Commons after George the First's accession the Tory 
members hardly numbered fifty, and their Jacobite leanings left them 
powerless over English poHtics. The King's Ministry was wholly 
drawn from the Whig party, though Marlborough and the leaders of 
the Junto were to their surprise set aside, and the chief offices given 
to younger men. The direction of affairs was really entrusted to 
Lord Townshend, who became Secretary of State, and his brother- 
in-law, Walpole, who successively occupied the posts of Paymaster 
of the Forces, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Lord of the 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



70s 



Treasury. The Townshend Administration was the first of a series 
of Whig Ministries which ruled England for half a century with- 
out any serious opposition. The length of their rule was due partly 
no doubt to an excellent organization. While their adversaries 
were divided by differences of principle and without leaders of real 
eminence, the Whigs stood as one man on the principles of the 
Revolution and produced great leaders who carried them into effect. 
They submitted with admirable discipline to the guidance of a knot 
of great landed proprietors, to the houses of Bentinck, Manners, 
Campbell, and Cavendish, to the Fitzroys and Lennoxes, the Russells 
and Grenvilles, families whose resistance to the Stuarts, whose share 
in the Revolution, whose energy in setting the line of Hanover on the 
throne, gave them a claim to power which their sober use of it long 
maintained without dispute. They devoted themselves with immense 
activity to the gaining and preserving an ascendency in the House of 
Commons. The wealth of the Whig houses was ungrudgingly spent 
in securing a monopoly of the small and corrupt constituencies which 
formed a large part of the borough representation. Of the county 
mem.bers, who were the weightier and more active part of the House, 
nine-tenths were for a long time relatives and dependants of the Whig 
families. The support of the commercial classes and of the great 
towns was won not only by the resolute maintenance of public credit, 
but by the devotion of a special attention to questions of trade and 
finance. But dexterous as was their management and compact as was 
their organization, it was to nobler qualities than these that the Whigs 
owed their long rule over England. They were true throughout to 
the principles on which they had risen into power, and their unbroken 
administration converted those principles into national habits. Before 
the fifty years of their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten 
that it was possible to persecute for differences of religion, or to 
put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the adminis- 
:ration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament. With the steadi- 
less of a great oligarchy, the Whigs combined, no doubt, its charac- 
teristic immobility. The tone of their administration was conserva- 
1 rive, cautious, and inactive. They were firm against any return to 
the past, but they shrank from any advance towards a new and 
more liberal future. " I am no reformer,^' Walpole used to say, 
! and the years of his power are years without parallel in our history 
, tor political stagnation. But for the time this inactivity not only 
saved them from great dangers, but fell in with the temper of the 
nation at large. Their great stumbling-blocks as a party since the 
1 Revolution had been the War and the Church. But they had learnt 
I to leave the Church alone, and their foreign policy became a 
1 policy of peace. At home their inaction was especially popular with 
I the one class who commonly press for political activity. The energy of 



Shc. X, 



7i36 



mSTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the trading class was absorbed for the time in the rapid extension of 
commerce and the rapid accumulation of wealth. So long as the 
country was justly and constitutionally governed they were content to 
leave government to the hands that held it. They wished only to be 
let alone to enjoy their new freedom, to develop their new industries. 
And the Whigs let them alone. Progress became material rather than 
political, but the material progress of the country was such as England 
had never seen before. ^ 

The conversion of England to the Whigs was hastened by a 
desperate attempt of the Pretender to gain the throne. There was 
no real hope of success, for the Jacobites in England were few, and 
the Tories were broken and dispirited by the fall of their leaders. 
Lord Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower ; while Bolinbroke 
fled over-sea at the threat of impeachment, and was followed by the 
Duke of Ormond, the great hope of the Jacobite party. But James 
Stuart was as inaccessible to reason as his father had been, and in 
spite of Bohnbroke's counsels he ordered the Earl of Mar to give the 
signal for revolt in the North. In Scotland the triumph of the Whigs 
meant the continuance of the House of Argyll in power, and the rival 
Highland clans were as ready for a blow at the Campbells under Mar as 
they had been ready for a blow at them under Dundee or Montrose. 
But Mar was a leader of different stamp from these. Six thousand High- 
landers joined him at Perth, but his cowardice and want of conduct 
kept his army idle till Argyll had gathered forces to meet it in an inde- 
cisive engagement at Sheriffmuir. The Pretender, who arrived too late 
for the action, proved a yet more sluggish and incapable leader than 
Mar : and at the close of 1715 the advance of fresh forces drove James 
over-sea again, and dispersed the clans to their hills. In England, the 
danger passed away like a dream. A few of the Catholic gentry rose 
in Northumberland, under Lord Derwentwater and Mr. Forster ; and 
the arrival of two thousand Highlanders who had been sent to join them 
by Mar spurred them to a march into Lancashire, where the Catholic 
party was strongest. But they were soon cooped up in Preston, and 
driven to a cowardly surrender. The leaders paid for their treason 
with their heads ; but no serious steps were taken to put an end to the 
danger from the north by bringing the clans into order. The Ministry, 
which was reconstituted at the end of 17 16 by the withdrawal of 
Townshend and Walpole, and now acknowledged Lord Stanhope as 
its head, availed itself of the Whig triumph to bring about a repeal 
of the Schism and Occasional Conformity Acts, and to venture with 
varying success on two constitutional changes. Under the Triennial 
Bill of William's reign the duration of a Parliament was limited to 
three years. Now that the House of Commons, however, was become 
the ruling power in the State, a change was absolutely required to 
secure steadiness and fixity of political action; and in 1716 the 



J 



ixo 



THE REVOLUTION. 



707 



duration of Parliament was extended to seven years by the Septennial 
Bill. The power which Harley^s creation of twelve peers showed the 
Crown to possess of swamping the majority in the House of Peers 
prompted the Ministry in 1720 to introduce a bill, w^hose origin was 
attributed to Lord Sunderland^ and which professed to secure the 
liberty of that House by limiting the Peerage to its present number in 
England and substituting twenty-five hereditary for the sixteen elected 
Peers from Scotland. The bill was strenuously opposed by Walpole, 
vv^ho had withdrawn from the Ministry on the expulsion of his friend 
Lord Townshend from office ; and to Walpole's opposition it mainly 
owed its defeat. It would, in fact, have rendered representative 
government impossible \ for representative government, as we have 
seen, had come to mean government by the will of the House of 
Commons, and had Sunderland's bill passed no power would have 
been left which could have forced the Peers to bow to the will of the 
Lower House in matters where their opinion was adverse to it. 

Abroad the Whigs aimed strictly at the maintenance of peace 
by a faithful adhesion to the Treaty of Utrecht. The one obstacle 
to peace was Spain. Its King, Philip of Anjou, had ceded the Italian 
possessions of his crown and renounced his own rights of succession 
to the throne of France, but his constant dream was to recover all 
he had given up. To attempt this was to defy Europe ; for Austria 
held the late possessions of Spain in Italy, the Milanese and Naples, 
while France, since the death of Lewis the Fourteenth (Sept. 171 5), 
w"as ruled by the Regent Duke of Orleans, who stood next under 
the treaty in succession to the French throne through Philip's renun- 
ciation. But the boldness of Cardinal Alberoni, who was now the 
Spanish Minister, accepted the risk. He began to intrigue against the 
Regent in France, and supported the Jacobite cause as a means of 
preventing the interference of England with his designs. He gained 
the aid of Sweden through the resentment of Charles the Twelfth 
at the cession to Hanover of the Swedish possessions of Bremen 
and Verden by the King of Denmark, who had seized them while 
Charles was absent in Turkey, a cession of the highest importance to 
the Electoral dominions, which were thus brought into contact with, 
the sea, and of hardly less value to England, as it secured the mouths 
of the Elbe and the Weser, the chief inlets for British commerce into 
Germany, to a friendly state. But the efforts of Alberoni were foiled 
by the union of his opponents. His first attempt was to recover the 
Italian provinces which Philip had lost, and armaments greater than 
Spain had seen for a century reduced Sardinia in 17 16, and attacked 
Sicily. England and France at once drew together, and were joined 
by Holland in a Triple Alliance, concluded in the opening of 17 17, 
and which guaranteed the succession of the House of Hanover in 
England, as well as of the House of Orleans in France, should its boy 

z z 2 



7o8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chai. 



king, Lewis XV., die without issue. The Triple Alliance became a 
Quadruple Alliance in 171 8 by the accession of the Emperor, whose 
Italian possessions the three Powers had guaranteed ; and the appear- 
ance of an English squadron in the Straits of Messina was followed by an 
engagement in which the Spanish fleet was all but destroyed. Alberoni 
strove to avenge the blow by fitting out an armament which the Duke 
of Ormond was to command for the revival of the Jacobite rising in 
Scotland, but his fleet was wrecked in the Bay of Biscay ; and the 
progress of the French armies in the north of Spain forced Philip at 
last to dismiss his Minister, to renew his renunciation of the French 
throne, and to withdraw from Sardinia and Sicily, on condition that 
the reversion of Parma and Tuscany should be secured to his son, 
the Infante Don Carlos. Sicily now passed to the Emperor, and 
Savoy was recompensed for its loss by the acquisition of Sardinia, 
from which its Duke took the title of King. At the same moment 
the schemes of Charles the Twelfth, who had concluded an alli- 
ance with the Czar, Peter the Great, for a restoration of the Stuarts, 
were brought to an end by his death at the siege of Fredericks- 
hall. But the ability and sense which Stanhope and his fellow 
Ministers showed in their foreign poHcy utterly failed them in dealing 
with the power of speculation which the sudden increase of commerce 
was rousing at home. The unknown wealth of South America had 
acted ever since the days of the Buccaneers like a spell on the imagina- 
tion of Englishmen ; and Harley gave countenance to a South Sea 
Company, which promised a reduction of the public debt as the price 
of a monopoly of the Spanish trade. Spain however clung jealously 
to her old prohibitions of all foreign commerce ; the Treaty of Utrecht 
only won for England the right of engaging in the negro slave-trade^ 
and of despatching a single ship to the coast ; but in spite of all this, 
the Company again came forward, offering in exchange for new privi- 
leges to pay off national burdens which amounted to nearly a million 
a year. It was in vain that Walpole warned the Ministry and the 
country against this " dream.'' Both went mad ; and in 1720 bubble 
Company followed bubble Company, till the inevitable reaction brought 
a general ruin in its train. 

The crash brought Stanhope to the grave. Of his colleagues, many 
were found to have received bribes from the South Sea Company to 
back its frauds. Craggs, the Secretary of State, died of terror at the 
investigation ; Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was sent to 
the Tower ; and in the general wreck of his rivals Walpole mounted 
again into power. His factious conduct when out of office had been 
redeemed by his opposition to the Peerage Bill : his weight with the 
country dates from his prescient warnings against the South Sea specu- 
lation. In 1 72 1 he again became First Lord of the Treasury, while 
Townshend returned to his post of Secretary of State. But there was 



[X,] 



THE REVOLUTION. 



709 



nothing to promise the longest tenure of power which any EngHsh Minis- 
ter since the Revolution has ever enjoyed, for Walpole remained at tht 
head of affairs for twenty-one years. But his long administration is 
almost without a history. Ail legislative and political activity abruptly 
ceased with his entry into office. Year after year passed by without 
a change. In the third year of his Ministry there was but one divi- 
sion in the House of Commons. The Tory members were so few that 
for a time they hardly cared to attend its sittings ; and in 1722 the loss 
of Bishop Atterbury of Rochester, who was convicted of correspondence 
with the Pretender, deprived of his bishopric, and banished by Act 
of Parliament, deprived the Jacobite party of their only remaining 
leader. But quiet as was the air of English politics under Walpole, his 
policy was in the main a large and noble one. He was the first and 
greatest of our Peace Ministers. " The most pernicious circumstances," 
he said, " in which this country can be are those of war ; as we must 
be losers while it lasts and cannot be great gainers when it ends." In 
spite of the complications of foreign affairs and the pressure from the 
Court and Opposition, he resolutely kept England at peace. It was 
not that the honour or influence of England suffered in Walpole's 
hands, for he won victories by the firmness of his policy and the 
skill of his negotiations as effectual as those which are won by arms. 
The most pressing danger, to European tranquillity lay in the fact that 
the Emperor Charles the Sixth was without a son. He had issued a 
Pragmatic Sanction, by which he provided that his hereditary 
dominions in Austria, Plungary, and Bohemia should descend un- 
broken to his daughter, Maria Theresa ; but the European powers 
had as yet declined to guarantee her succession. Spain, however, 
anxious as of old to recover Gibraltar and Minorca from England, 
and still irritated against France, offered not only to waive her own 
claims and guarantee the Pragmatic Sanction, but to grant the highest 
trading privileges in her American dominions to a commercial trading 
company which the Emperor had established at Ostend in defiance 
of the Treaty of Westphalia and the remonstrances of England and 
Holland, on condition that the Emperor secured the succession of 
Carlos, Philip's second son, to the Duchies of Parma and Tuscany. 
At the same time Russia, which was now governed by Catherine, the 
wife of Peter the Great, forced Sweden into an alliance for an attack 
upon Denmark, and secretly negotiated with Spain and the Emperor. 
Townshend met the last danger by a defensive treaty between France, 
England, and Prussia, which he concluded at Hanover, by a subsidy 
which detached Sweden from her ally, and by the despatch of a squadron 
into the Baltic. But the withdrawal of Prussia from the Treaty of 
Hanover gave fresh courage to the Emperor, and in 1727 Charles with- 
drew his ambassador from England, while Philip began the siege of 
Gibraltar. The Emperor, however was held in check by the death of the j 



710 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Char 



Russian Empress and the firm attitude of England, France, and Hol- 
land ; and Spain, finding herself too weak to wage war alone, concluded 
in 1729 the Treaty of Seville with the three powers. The Emperor 
still held aloof till 173 1, when the five States united in the Treaty of 
Vienna, which satisfied Spain by giving the Italian Duchies to Don 
Carlos, while the maritime powers contented Charles by guaranteeing 
the Pragmatic Sanction. 

Walpole was not only the first English Peace Minister ; he was 
the first English Minister who was a great financier, and who regarded 
the development of national wealth and the adjustment of national 
burdens as the business of a statesman. His time of power was 
a time of great material prosperity. In 1724 the King could con- 
gratulate the country on its possession of "peace with all powers 
abroad, at home perfect tranquillity, plenty, and an uninterrupted 
enjoyment of all civil and religious rights." Population was growing 
fast. That of Manchester and Birmingham doubled in thirty years. 
The rise of manufactures was accompanied by a sudden increase 
of commerce, which was due mainly to the rapid development of our 
colonies. Liverpool, which owes its creation to the new trade with 
the West, sprang up from a little country town into the third port in the 
kingdom. With peace and security, the value of land, and with it the 
rental of every country gentleman, tripled ; while the introduction of 
winter roots, of artificial grasses, of the system of a rotation of crops, 
changed the whole character of agriculture, and spread wealth through 
the farming classes. The wealth around him never made Walpole 
swerve from a rigid economy, from the steady reduction of the debt, 
or the diminution of fiscal duties. Even before the death of George 
the First the public burdens were reduced by twenty millions. But he 
had the sense to see that the wisest course a statesman can take in 
presence of a great increase in national industry and national wealth 
is to look quietly on and let it alone. What he did do however was 
wise, and what he strove to do was yet wiser. As early as 1720 he 
declared in a speech from the Throne that nothing would more con- 
duce to the extension of commerce "than to make the exportation 
of our own manufactures, and the importation of the commodities 
used in the manufacturing of them, as practicable and easy as may 
be." The first act of his financial administration was to take off the 
duties from more than a hundred British exports, and nearly forty 
articles of importation. In 1730 he broke in the same enlightened 
spirit through the prejudice which restricted the commerce of the 
colonies to the mother-country alone, by allowing Georgia and the 
Carolinas to export their rice directly to any part of Europe. The result 
was that the rice of America soon drove that of Italy and Egypt from 
the market. His Excise Bill, defective as it was, was the first mea- 
sure in which an English Minister showed any real grasp of the 



IX. 



THE REVOLUTION-. 



711 



principles of taxation. No tax had from the first moment of its 
introduction been more unpopular than the Excise. Its origin was 
due to Pym and the Long Parliament, v/ho imposed duties on beer, 
cider, and perry, which at the Restoration produced an annual 
income of more than six hundred thousand pounds. The war 
with France brought with it the malt-tax and additional duties on 
spirits, wine, tobacco, and other articles. So great had been the 
increase in the public wealth that the return from the Excise 
amounted at the death of George the First to nearly two milhons 
and a half a year. But its unpopularity remained unabated, and 
even philosophers like Locke contended that the whole public revenue 
should be drawn from direct taxes upon the land. Walpole, on the 
other hand, saw in the growth of indirect taxation a means of freeing 
the land from all burdens whatever. Smuggling and fraud diminished 
the revenue by immense sums. The loss on tobacco alone amounted 
to a third of the whole duty. The Excise Bill of 1733 i^^t this evil by 
the establishment of bonded warehouses, and by the collection of the 
duties from the inland dealers in the form of Excise and not of Customs. 
The first measure would have made London a free port, and doubled 
English trade. The second would have so largely increased the reve- 
nue, without any loss to the consumer, as to enable Walpole to repeal 
the land-tax. In the case of tea and coffee alone, the change in the 
mode of levying the duty brought in an additional hundred thou- 
sand pounds a year. The necessaries of life and the raw materials 
of manufacture were in Walpole's plan to remain absolutely untaxed. 
Every part of Walpole's scheme has since been carried into effect ; 
but in 1733 he stood before his time. An agitation of unprecedented 
violence forced him to withdraw the bill. 

But if Walpole^s aims were wise and statesmanlike, he was unscrupu- 
lous in the means by which he realized them. Personally he was free 
from corruption ; and he is perhaps the first great English statesman 
who left office poorer than when he entered it. But he was certainly the 
first who made parliamentary corruption a regular part of his system of 
government. Corruption was older than Walpole, for it sprang out of 
the very transfer of power to the House of Commons which had begun 
with the Restoration. The transfer was complete, and the House was 
supreme in the State ; but while freeing itself from the control of the 
Crown, it was as yet only imperfectly responsible to the people. It was 
only at election time that a member felt the pressure of public opinion. 
The secresy of parliamentary proceedings, which had been needful 
as a safeguard against royal interference with debate, served as a 
safeguard against interference on the part of constituencies. This 
strange union of immense power with absolute freedom from responsi- 
bility brought about its natural results in the bulk of members. A 
vote was too valuable to be given without recompense. Parliamentary 



Sec. X. 

Walpole, 
1712 
174.2. 



Walpole 
and tlie 
, Parlia- 
ment. 



712 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Ckap. 



support had to be bought by places, pensions, and bribes in hard cash. 
Walpole was probably less corrupt than Danby who preceded or the 
Pelhams who followed him, but he was far more cynical in his avowal 
of corruption. Even if he was falsely credited with the saying that 
" every man has his price,'' he was always ready to pay the price of any 
man who was worth having. And he was driven to employ corruption 
lavishly by the very character of his rule. In the absence of a strong 
opposition and of great impulses to enthusiasm a party breaks 
readily into factions ; and the weakness of the Tories joined with the 
stagnation of public affairs to beget faction among the Whigs. 
Walpole, too, was jealous of power : and as his jealousy drove 
colleague after colleague out of office, they became leaders of a party 
of so-called " Patriots" whose whole end was to drive the Minister from 
his post. This Whig faction, which was headed by Pulteney and Lord 
Chesterfield, soon rallied to it the fragment of the Tory party which 
remained, and which was now guided by the virulent ability of Bolin- 
broke, whom Walpole had suffered to return from exile, but to whom 
he had refused the restoration of his seat in the House of Lords. 

Through the reign of George the First these ** Patriots " increased 
in numbers, and at the accession of his son George the Second 
in 1727 they counted on their enemy's fall ; for the new K'ng hated 
his father and his father's counsellors, and had spoken of Walpole as 
" a rogue." But jealous of authority as he was, George the Second was 
absolutely guided by the adroitness of his wife, CaroHne of Anspach, 
and Caroline had resolved that there should be no change in the 
Ministry. The ten years which followed were in fact the years during 
which Walpole's power was at its highest. The Jacobites refused to 
stir. The Church was quiet. The Dissenters pressed for a repeal of 
the Test and Corporation Acts, but Walpole was resolved not to rouse 
passions of religious hate which only slumbered, and satisfied them 
by an annual Act of Indemnity for any breach of these penal statutes. 
A few trade measures and social reforms crept quietly through the 
Houses. An inquiry into the state of the gaols showed that social 
thought was not utterly dead. A bill of great value enacted that all 
procedings in courts of justice should henceforth be in the English 
language. Walpole's chief effort at financial reform, the Excise Bill 
of 1733, was foiled as we have seen by the factious ignorance of the 
" Patriots." The violence of his opponents was backed by an outburst 
of popular prejudice ; riots almost grew into revolt ; and in spite of 
the Queen's wish to put down resistance by force, Walpole with- 
drew the bill. " I will not be the minister," he said with noble self- 
command, " to enforce taxes at the expense of blood." He showed 
equal wisdom and courage in the difficulties which again rose 
abroad. In 1733 the peace of Europe was broken afresh by disputes 
which rose out of a contested election to the throne of Poland. The 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION, 



m 



King was eager to fight, and even Caroline's German sympathies in- 
clined her to join in the fray ; but Walpole stood firm for the obser- 
vance of neutrality. " There are fifty thousand men slain this year in 
Europe," he was able to say as the war went on, " and not one EngHsh- 
man." The intervention of England and Holland succeeded in 
1736 in restoring peace at the cost of the cession of Naples to Don 
Carlos and of Lorraine to France. 

Walpole's defeat on the Excise Bill had done little to shake his 
power, and Bolinbroke withdrew to France in despair at the failure 
of his efforts. But the Queen's death in 1737, and the violent 
support which the Prince of Wales gave the ^' Patriots " from hatred 
to his father, were more serious blows. The country, too, wearied 
at last of its monotonous prosperity and of its monotonous peace. 
It was hard to keep from war in the Southern Seas. The merchant 
class were determined to carry on their trade with Spanish America, | 
a trade which rested indeed on no legal right, but had grown largely ' 
through the connivance of the Spanish officers during the long alliance 
with England from 1670 to the War of Succession. But the accession 
of a French prince to the Spanish throne had brought about a cessation 
of this connivance. Philip of Anjou was hostile to English trade with 
his American dominions ; and the efforts of Spain to preserve its own 
monopoly, to put down the vast system, of smuggHng which rendered 
it valueless, and to restrict English commerce to the negro slave- 
trade and the single ship stipulated by the Treaty of Utrecht, brought 
about collisions which made it hard to keep the peace. Walpole, 
who strove to do justice to both parties in the matter, was abused as 
" the cur-dog of England and spaniel of France.'^ The ill-humour of the 
trading classes rose to madness in 1738 when a merchant captain 
named Jenkins told at the bar of the House of Commons the tale of 
his torture by the Spaniards, and produced an ear which he said they 
had cut off with taunts at the English king. It was in vain that 
Walpole battled stubbornly against the cry for war. His negotiations 
were foiled by the frenzy of the one country and the pride of the 
other. He stood alone in his desire for peace. His peace policy 
rested on the alliance with Holland and France ; but the temporary 
hostihty excited by the disputes over the succession between Philip 
and the House of Orleans had passed away with the birth of children 
to Lewis the Fifteenth, and the Bourbon Courts were again united 
by family sympathies. He foresaw therefore that a Spanish war 
w^ould probably bring with it the rupture of the French alliance at 
the very moment when the approaching death of the Emperor made 
the union of the western powers essential to the peace of Europe. 
Against a war which undid all that he had laboured for twenty years 
to do Walpole struggled hard. But the instinct of the nation was in 
fact wiser than the policy of the Minister. Although neither Eng- 



Sec. X. 

Walpole. 
1712- 
17-42. 



714 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



land nor Walpole knew it, a Family Compact had been concluded 
between France and Spain as long before as 1733, on the outbreak 
of the war of the Polish Succession, for the ruin of the maritime 
^supremacy of England. Spain bound herself to deprive England 
gradually of her commercial privileges in America, and to transfer her 
trade to France. France in return engaged to support Spain at sea 
and to aid her in the recovery of Gibraltar. The caution with which 
Walpole held aloof from the Polish war rendered the Compact inope- 
rative at the time, but neither country ceased to look forward to its 
future execution. France since the peace had strained every nerve to 
prepare a fleet : while Spain had steadily increased the restrictions on 
British commerce. Both were in fact watching for the opportunity of 
war which the Emperor's death was sure to afford, and in forcing on 
the struggle England only anticipated a danger which she could not 
escape. 

The Compact however, though suspected, was still unknown, and the 
perils of a contest with Spain were clear enough to justify Walpole in 
struggling hard for peace. But he struggled single-handed. His 
greed of power had mastered his strong common sense ; Lord Towns- 
hend had been driven from office in 1730, Lord Chesterfield dismissed 
in 1733 ; and though he started with the ablest administration ever 
known, Walpole was left after twenty years of administration with but 
a single man of ability, the Chancellor, Lord Hardwicke, in his cabinet. 
The colleagues whom, one by one, his jealousy had dismissed had 
plunged, with the exception of Townshend, into an opposition more j 
factious and unprincipled than had ever disgraced English politics ; . 
and these "Patriots" were now reinforced by a band of younger 
Whigs — the " Boys," as Walpole called them — whose temper revolted 
alike against the peace and corruption of his policy, and at whose 
head stood a young cornet of horse, William Pitt. Baffled as this 
opposition had been for so many years, the sudden rush of popular 
passion gave it a new strength, and in 1739 Walpole bowed to its will 
in declaring war. " They may ring their bells now," the Minister said 
bitterly, as peals and bonfires welcomed his defeat, " but they will J 
soon be wringing their hands." His foresight was quickly justified. No 1 
sooner had Admiral Vernon with an English fleet bombarded and j 
taken Portobello than France refused to suffer England to settle on 
the mainland of South America, and despatched two squadrons to the 
West Indies. At this crisis the death of Charles the Sixth (Oct. 
1740) forced on the European struggle which Walpole had dreaded. 
France saw in this event and the disunion which it at once brought 
about an opportunity of finishing the work begun by Henry the 
Second, and which RicheHeu, Lewis the Fourteenth, and Cardinal 
Fleury had carried on — the work of breaking up the Empire into a group 
of powers too weak to resist French ambition. In union therefore 



IX.] 



THE REVOLUTION 



with Spain, which aimed at the annexation of the Milanese, and the 
King of Prussia, Frederick the Second, who at once occupied Silesia, 
France backed the Elector of Bavaria in his claim on the Duchy of 
Austria, which passed with the other hereditary dominions, by the 
Pragmatic Sanction, to the Queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa. 
Sweden and Sardinia allied themselves to France. England alone 
showed herself true to her guaranty of the Austrian Succession. 
In the summer of 1741 two French armies entered Germany, and the 
Elector of Bavaria appeared unopposed before Vienna. Never had 
the House of Austria stood in such utter peril. Its opponents counted 
on a division of its dominions. France claimed the Netherlands, Spain 
the Milanese, Bavaria the kingdom of Bohemia, Frederick the Second 
Silesia. Hungary and the Duchy of Austria alone were to be left to 
Maria Theresa. Even England, though still true to her cause, advised 
her to purchase Frederick's aid by the cession of Silesia. But the 
Queen refused to despair. She won the support of Hungary by restor- 
ing its constitutional rights ; and the subsidies of England enabled 
her to march at the head of a Hungarian army to the rescue of 
Vienna, to overrun Bavaria, and repulse an attack of Frederick on 
Moravia in the spring of 1742. But on England's part the contest 
went on feebly and ineffectively. Admiral Vernon was beaten before 
Carthagena ; and Walpole was charged with thwarting and starving 
the war. He still repelled the attacks of the "Patriots" with wonderful 
spirit; but in a new Parliament his majority dropped to sixteen, and 
in his own cabinet he became almost powerless. The buoyant temper 
which had carried him through so many storms broke down at last. 
'^ He who was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow," writes 
his son, " now never sleeps above an hour without waking : and he 
who at dinner always forgot his own anxieties, and was more gay 
and thoughtless than all the company, now sits without speaking, 
and with his eyes fixed for an hour together." The end was in fact 
near ; and the dwindling of his majority to three forced Walpole in 
the opening of 1742 to resign. 



Sec. X. 

Walpols 
i712- 
1742. 



7i6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



CHAPTER X. 
MODERN ENGLAND. 

Section I.— William Pitt. 174.2—1762. 

[Authorities. — Lord Stanhope and Horace Walpole, as before. Southey's 
biography, or the more elaborate life by Mr. Tyerman, gives an account of 
Wesley and the movement he headed. For Pitt himself, the Chatham cor- 
respondence, his life by Thackeray, and Lord Macaulay's two essays on him. 
The Annual Register begins with 1758, its earlier portion has been attributed to 
Burke. Carlyle's ** Frederick the Great " gives a picturesque account of the 
Seven Years' War and of England's share in it. For Clive, see the biography 
by Sir John Malcolm, and Lord Macaulay's well-known essay.] 



The fall of Walpole revealed a change in the temper of England 
which was to influence from that time to this its social and political 
history. New forces, new cravings, new aims, which had been silently 
gathering beneath the crust of inaction, burst suddenly into view. 
The first of these embodied itself in the religious and philanthropic 
movement which bears the name of Wesley. Never had religion 
seemed at a lower ebb. The progress of free inquiry, the aversion 
from theological strife which had been left by the Civil War, the new 
intellectual and material channels opened to human energy, had pro- 
duced a general indifference to the great questions of religious specu- 
lation which occupied an earlier age. The Church, predominant 
as its influence seemed at the close of the Revolution, had sunk 
into political insignificance. By a suspension of the sittings of Con- 
vocation Walpole deprived the clergy of their chief means of agita- 
tion, while he carefully abstained from all measures which could 
arouse the prejudices of their flocks. The bishops, who were exclusively 
chosen from among the small number of Whig ecclesiastics, were 
rendered powerless by the Toryism and estrangement of their clergy, 
while the clergy themselves stood apart from all active interference 
in public affairs. Nor was their political repose compensated by any j 
religious activity. A large number of prelates were mere Whig 
partizans with no higher aim than that of "promotion. The levees of | 
the Ministers were crowded with lawn sleeves. A Welsh bishop ' 
avowed that he had seen his diocese but once, and habitually resided 
at the lakes of Westmoreland. The system of pluralities turned the 
wealthier and more learned of the priesthood into absentees, while the 



X.] 



MODERN- ENGLAND, 



717 



bulk of them were indolent, poor, and vzithout social consideration. 
A shrewd, if prejudiced, observer brands the English clergy of the 
day as the most lifeless in Europe, " the most remiss of their labours 
in private, and the least severe in their lives." The decay of the great 
dissenting bodies went hand in hand with that of the Church, and 
during the early part of the century the Nonconformists declined in 
number as in energy. But it would be rash to conclude from this 
outer ecclesiastical paralysis that the religious sentiment was dead in 
the people at large. There was, no doubt, a revolt against religion 
and against churches in both the extremes of English society. In 
the higher circles " everyone laughs," said Montesquieu on his visit to 
England, " if one talks of religion." Of the prominent statesmen of 
the time the greater part were unbelievers in any form of Christianity, 
and distinguished for the grossness and immorahty of their lives. 
Drunkenness and foul talk were thought no discredit to Walpole. A 
later prime minister, the Duke of Grafton, was in the habit of appearing 
with his mistress at the play. Purity and fidelity to the marriage vow 
were sneered out of fashion ; and Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his 
son, instructs hirn in the art of seduction as part of a polite education. 
At the other end of the social scale lay the masses of the poor. They 
were ignorant and brutal to a degree which it is hard to conceive, for 
the vast increase of population which followed on the growth of towns 
and the development of manufactures had been met by no effort for 
their religious or educational improvement. Not a new parish had 
been created. Hardly a single new church had been built. Schools 
there were none, save the grammar schools of Edward and Elizabeth. 
The rural peasantry, who were fast being reduced to pauperism by the 
abuse of the poor-laws, were left without moral or religious training 
of any sort. " We saw but one Bible in the parish of Cheddar," said 
Hannah More at a far later time, "and that was used to prop a flower- 
pot." Within the towns things were worse. There was no effective 
police ; and in great outbreaks the mob of London or Birmingham 
burnt houses, flung open prisons, and sacked and pillaged at their 
will. The criminal class gathered boldness and numbers in the face 
of ruthless laws which only testified to the terror of society, laws 
which made it a capital crime to cut down a cherry tree, and which 
strung up twenty young thieves of a morning in front of Newgate ; 
while the introduction of gin gave a new impetus to drunkenness. In 
the streets of London gin-shops invited every passer-by to get drunk 
for a penny, or dead drunk for twopence. 

In spite however of scenes such as this, England as a whole 
remained at heart religious. Even the apathy of the clergy was 
mingled with a new spirit of charity and good sense, a tendency to 
subordinate ecclesiastical differences to the thought of a common 
Christianity, and to substitute a rational theology for the worn-out 



The 

Religious 

Bevival 



7x8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



traditions of the past. In the middle class the old piety lived on 
unchanged, and it was from this class that a religious revival burst 
forth at the close of Walpole's ministry, which changed in a few years 
the whole temper of English society. The Church was restored to 
life and activity. Religion carried to the hearts of the poor a fresh 
spirit of moral zeal, while it purified our literature and our manners. 
A new philanthropy reformed our prisons, infused clemency and 
wisdom into our penal laws, abolished the slave trade, and gave the 
first impulse to popular education. The revival began in a small 
knot of Oxford students, whose revolt against the religious dead- 
ness of their times showed itself in ascetic observances, an enthu- 
siastic devotion, and a methodical regularity of life which gained 
them the nickname of " Methodists.^' Three figures detached them- 
selves from the group as soon as, on its transfer to London in 1738, 
it attracted public attention by the fervour and even extravagance of 
its piety ; and each found his special work in the great task to which 
the instinct of the new movement led it from the first, that of carrying 
religion and morality to the vast masses of population which lay con- 
centrated in the towns or around the mxines and collieries of Cornwall 
and the north. Whitfield, a servitor of Pembroke College, was 
above all the preacher of the revival. Speech was governing English 
politics ; and the religious power of speech was shown when a dread 
of ^^ enthusiasm " closed against the new apostles the pulpits of the 
Established Church, and forced them to preach in the fields. Their 
voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous corners of the 
land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the dens ot 
London, or in the long galleries where the Cornish miner hears in the 
pauses of his labour the sobbing of the sea. Whitfield's preaching was 
such as England had never heard before, theatrical, extravagant, often 
commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense reality, its 
earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the sin and 
sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring 
gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious 
Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll 
at Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal- 
pits, and see as he preached the tears " making white channels down 
their blackened cheeks." On the rough and ignorant masses to whom 
they spoke the effect of Whitfield and his fellow Methodists was 
terrible both for good and ill. Their preaching stirred a passionate 
hatred in their opponents. Their lives were often in danger, the> "^ 
were mobbed, they were ducked, they were stoned, they were smothered 
with filth. But the enthusiasm they aroused was equally passionate. 
Women fell down in convulsions ; strong men were smitten suddenly 
to the earth ; the preacher was interrupted by bursts of hysteric 
laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of strong spiritual 



XI 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



719 



excitement, so familiar nov/, but at that time strange and unknown, 
followed on their sermons ; and the terrible sense of a conviction 
of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms at 
once grotesque and sublime. Charles Wesley, a Christ Church student, 
came to add sweetness to this sudden and startling light. He was 
Ine " sweet singer ^' of the movement. His hymns expressed the fiery 
conviction of its converts in lines so chaste and beautiful that its 
more extravagant features disappeared. The wild throes of hysteric 
onthusiasm passed into a passion for hymn-singing, and a new 
musical impulse was aroused in the people which gradually changed 
the face of public devotion throughout England. 

But it was his elder brother, John Wesley, who embodied in 
himself not this or that side of the vast movement, but the very 
movement itself. Even at Oxford, where he resided as a fellow 
of Lincoln, he had been looked upon as head of the group of 
Methodists, and after his return from a quixotic mission to the Indians 
of Georgia he again took the lead of the little society, which had re- 
moved in the interval to London. In power as a preacher he stood 
next to Whitfield ; as a hymn-writer he stood second to his brother 
Charles. But while combining in some degree the excellences of 
either, he possessed qualities in which both were utterly deficient ; an 
indefatigable industry, a cool judgment, a command over others, a 
faculty of organization, a singular union of patience and moderation 
with an imperious ambition, which marked him as a ruler of men. 
He had, besides, a learning and skill in writing which no other of 
the Methodists possessed ; he was older than any of his colleagues at 
the start of the movement, and he outlived them all. His life indeed 
from 1703 to 1 79 1 almost covers the century, and the Methodist 
body had passed through every phase of its history before he sank 
into the grave at the age of eighty-eight. It would have been im- 
possible for Wesley to have wielded the power he did had he not 
shared the follies and extravagance as well as the enthusiasm of his 
disciples. Throughout his life his asceticism was that of a monk. At 
times he lived on bread only, and often slept on the bare boards. He 
lived in a world of wonders and divine interpositions. It was a 
miracle if the rain stopped and allowed him to set forward on a 
journey. It was a judgment of Heaven if a hailstorm burst over a 
town which had been deaf to his preaching. One day, he tells us, 
when he was tired and his horse fell lame, " I thought — cannot God 
.leal either man or beast by any means or without any 1 — immediately 
my headache ceased and my horse^s lameness in the same instant." 
With a still more childish fanaticism he guided his conduct, whether 
in ordinary events or in the great crises of his life, by drawing lots or 
watching the particular texts at which his Bible opened. But with all 
this extravagance and superstition, Wesley's mind was essentially 



Sec. I. 



720 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[A p. 



practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at the head ot \ 
a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary. In his \ 
earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the narrow- 
ness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitfield began 
his sermons in the fields, Wesley " could not at first reconcile himself 
to that strange way.'' He condemned and fought against the ad- 
mission of laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but 
laymen to preach. To the last he clung passionately to the Church of 
England, and looked on the body he had formed as but a lay society 
in full communion with it. He broke with the Moravians, who had 
been the earliest friends of the new movement, when they endangered 
its safe conduct by their contempt of religious forms. He broke with 
Whitfield when the great preacher plunged into an extravagant Calvin- 
ism. But the same practical temper of mind which led him to reject what 
was unmeasured, and to be the last to adopt what was new, enabled him 
at once to grasp and organize the novelties he adopted. He became 
himself the most unwearied of field preachers, and his journal for 
half a century is little more than a record of fresh journeys and fresh 
sermons. When once driven to employ lay helpers in his ministry he 
made their work a new and attractive feature in his system. His 
earlier asceticism only lingered in a dread of social enjoyments and 
an aversion from the gayer and sunnier side of life which links the 
Methodist movement with that of the Puritans. As the fervour of his 
superstition died down into the calm of age, his cool common sense 
discouraged in his followers the enthusiastic outbursts which marked 
the opening of the revival. His powers were bent to the building up 
of a great religious society which might give to the new enthusiasm 
a lasting and practical form. The Methodists were grouped into 
classes, gathered in love-feasts, purified by the expulsion of unworthy 
members, and furnished with an alternation of settled ministers and 
wandering preachers ; while the whole body was placed under the 
absolute government of a Conference of ministers. But so long as 
he lived the direction of the new religious society remained with 
Wesley alone. " If by arbitrary power," he replied with a charming 
simplicity to objectors, " you mean a power which I exercise simply 
without any colleagues therein, this is certainly true, but I see no hurt 
in it." 

The great body which he thus founded— a body which m . i a 

hundred thousand members at his death, and which now coiuits it 
members in England and America by milhons — bears the stamp o 
Wesley in more than its name. Of all Protestant Churches \X. is th . 
most rigid in its organization and the most despotic in its government 
But the Methodists themselves were the least result of the Methodis 
revival. Its action upon the Church broke the lethargy of the clergy, 
and the "Evangelical" movement, which found representatives lil; - 



xj 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



721 



Newton and Cecil within the pale of the Establishment, made the 
fox-hunting parson and the absentee rector at last impossible. In 
Walpole's day the English clergy were the idlest and most lifeless in 
the world. In our own time no body of religious ministers surpasses 
them in piety, in philanthropic energy, or in popular regard. In the 
nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and 
pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose 
power was seen in the disappearance of the profligacy which had 
disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested lite- 
rature, ever since the Restoration. But the noblest result of the religious 
revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day 
to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the 
social degradation of the profligate and the poor. It was not till the 
Wesleyan movement had done its work that the philanthropic move- 
ment began. The Sunday Schools established by Mr. Raikes of 
Gloucester at the close of the century were the beginnings of popular 
education. By writings and by her own personal example Hannah 
More drew the sympathy of England to the poverty and crime of the 
agricultural labourer. The passionate impulse of human sympathy 
with the wronged and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, 
built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen, supported Burke in 
his plea for the Hindoo, and Clarkson and Wilberforce in their crusade 
against the iniquity of the slave-trade. It is only the moral chivalry 
of his labours that amongst a crowd of philanthropists draws us most, 
perhaps, to the work and character of John Howard. The sympathy 
which all were feeling for the sufferings of mankind he felt for the 
sufferings of the worst and most hapless of men. With wonderful 
ardour and perseverance he devoted himself to the cause of the debtor, 
the felon, and the murderer. His appointment to the office of High 
Sheriff of Bedfordshire drew his attention in 1774 to the state of the 
prisons which were placed in his care ; and from that time the quiet 
country gentleman, whose only occupation had been reading his Bible 
and studying his thermometer, became the most energetic and zealous 
of reformers. Before a year was over he had personally visited almost 
every English gaol, and he found in nearly all of them frightful abuses 
which had been noticed half a century before, but left unredressed 
by Parliament. Gaolers, who bought their places, were paid by fees, 
and suffered to extort what they could. Even when acquitted men 
were dragged back to their cells for want of funds to discharge the 
sums they owed to their keepers. Debtors and felons were huddled 
together in the prisons, which Howard found crowded by the cruel 
legislation of the day. No separation was preserved between different j 
sexes, no criminal disciphne enforced. Every gaol was a chaos of | 
cruelty and the foulest immorality, from which the prisoner could only j 
escape by sheer starvation or by the gaol-fever that festered without! 



3 A 



722 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PI 



[Chap. 



ceasing in these haunts of wretchedness. He s . :hing with his 

own eyes, he tested every suffering by his ov 3nce. In one 

gaol he found a cell so narrow and noisome th .or wretch who 

inhabited it begged as a mercy for hanging. " :,hut himself up 

in the cell and bore its darkness and foulness till na,i. :e could bear no 
more. But it was by work of this sort, and by the faithful pictures of 
such scenes which it enabled him to give, that he brought about their 
reform. The work in which he recorded his terrible experience, 
and the plans which he submitted for the reformation of criminals, 
make him the father, so far as England is concerned, of prison disci- 
pline. But his labours were far from being confined to England. In 
journey after journey he visited the prisons of Holland and Germany, 
till his longing to discover some means of checking the fatal progress 
of the Plague led him to examine the lazarettos of Europe and the 
East. He was still engaged in this work of charity when he was 
seized by a malignant fever at Cherson in Southern Russia, and "laid 
quietly in the earth," as he desired. 

While the revival of the Wesley s was stirring the very heart of 
England, its political stagnation was unbroken. The triumph of 
Walpole's opponents ended with their victory. Retiring to the Peers 
as Earl of Orford, he devoted himself to breaking up the opposition 
and restoring the union of the Whigs, while he remained the confi- 
dential counsellor of the King. Pulteney accepted the Earldom of 
Bath and at once lost much of his political weight, while his more 
prominent followers were admitted to office. But when on the death 
of their nominal leader. Lord Wilmington, Pulteney claimed the post 
of First Minister in 1743, Walpole quietly interfered and induced the 
King to raise Henry -Pelham, the brother of the Duke of Newcastle, 
and one of his own most faithful adherents, to the head of the admi- 
nistration. The temper of Henry Pelham, as well as a consciousness 
of his own mediocrity, disposed him to a policy of conciliation which 
reunited the Whigs, and included every man of ability in his new 
Ministry. The union of the party was aided by the reappearance of 
a danger which seemed to have passed away. The foreign policy 
of Walpole triumphed at the moment of his falL The pressure of 
England, aided by a victory of Frederick at Chotusitz, forced Maria 
Theresa to consent to a peace with Prussia on the terms of the 
cession of Silesia ; and this peace enabled the Austrian army to 
drive the French from Bohemia at the close of 1742. Meanwhile one 
English fleet blockaded Cadiz, another anchored in the bay of Naples 
and forced Don Carlos by a threat of bombarding his capital to con- 
clude a treaty of neutrality, while English subsidies detached Sardinia 
from the French alliance. But at this point the loss of Walpole made j 
itself felt. The foreign policy of the weak Ministry which succeeded 
him was chiefly directed by Lord Carteret ; and Carteret^ who, like the \ 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



1^}> 



bulk of the Whig party, had long been opposed in heart to Walpole's 
system, resolved to change the whole character of the war. While 
Walpole limited his efforts to the preservation of the House of Austria 
as a European power, Carteret joined Maria Theresa in aiming at the 
ruin of the House of Bourbon In the dreams of the statesmen of 
Vienna, the whole face of Europe was to be changed. Naples and 
Sicily were to be taken back from Spain, Elsass and Lorraine from 
France ; and the Imperial dignity which had passed to the Elector of 
Bavaria, the Emperor Charles VII., was to be restored to the Austrian 
House. To carry out these schemes an Austrian army drove the 
Emperor from Bavaria in the spring of 1743 ; while George the Second, 
who warmly supported the policy of Carteret, put himself at the head 
of a force of forty thousand men, the bulk of whom were English and 
Hanoverians, and marched from the Netherlands to the Main. His 
advance was checked and finally turned into a retreat by the Due de 
Noailles, who appeared with a superior army on the south bank of 
the river, and finally throwing thirty-one thousand men across it 
threatened to compel the King to surrender. In the battle of Dettingen 
which followed (June 27, 1743) the allied army was in fact only saved 
from destruction by the impetuosity of the French horse and the 
dogged obstinacy with which the English held their ground and at 
last forced their opponents to recross the Main. But small as was the 
victory, it produced amazing results. The French evacuated Germany. 
The English and Austrian armies appeared on the Rhine. In the 
spring of 1744 an Austrian army marched upon Naples, wath the pur- 
pose of transferring it after its conquest to the Emperor, whose here- 
ditary dominions in Bavaria were to pass in return to Maria Theresa. 
But if Frederick of Prussia had withdrawn from the war on the 
cession of Silesia, he was resolute to take up arms again rather than 
suffer this great aggrandisement of the House of Austria. His 
sudden alliance with France failed at first to change the course of the 
\\^ar, for though he was successful in seizing Prague and drawing the 
Austrian army from the Rhine he was soon driven from Bohemia, 
while the death of the Emperor forced Bavaria to lay down its arms 
and to ally itself with Maria Theresa. So high were the Queen's 
hopes at this moment that she formed a secret alliance with Russia for 
the division of the Prussian monarchy. But in 1745 the tide turned. 
Marshal Saxe established the superiority of the French army in Flan- 
ders by his defeat of the Duke of Cumberland. Advancing with a 
force of English, Dutch, and Hanoverians to the relief of Tournay, 
the Duke on the 31st of May 1745 found the French covered by a 
line of fortified villages and redoubts with but a single narrow gap 
near the hamlet of Fontenoy. Into this gap however, the English 
troops, formed in a dense column, doggedly thrust themselves in spite 
of a terrible fire ; but at the moment when the day seemed won the 

3 A 2 



72 I. 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. 

William 

Pitt. 
174.2- 
1762. 



Cbarles 



French guns, rapidly concentrated in their front, tore the column in 
pieces and drove it back in a slow and orderly retreat. The blow was 
quickly followed up in June by a victory of Frederick at Hohenfried- 
burg which drove the Aiistrians from Silesia, and by a landing of 
Charles Edward, the son of the Old Pretender as James Stuart was 
called, on the coast of Scotland at the close of July. But defeat abroad 
and danger at home only quickened a political reaction which had 
begun long before in England. Even Carteret had been startled by 
the plan for a dismemberment of Prussia ; and as early as 1744 the 
bulk of the Whig party had learnt the wisdom of the more temperate 
policy of Walpole, and had opened the way for an accommodation 
with Frederick by compelling Carteret to resign. The Pelhams, who 
represented Walpole's system, were now supreme, and their work was 
aided by the disasters of 1745. When England was threatened by a 
Catholic Pretender, it was no time for weakening the chief Protestant 
power in Germany. On the refusal therefore of Maria Theresa to join 
in a general peace, England concluded the Convention of Hanover 
with Prussia at the close of August, and withdrew so far as Germany 
was concerned from the war. 

The danger at home indeed had already vindicated Walpole's pru- 
dence in foiling the hopes of the Pretender by his steady friendship 
with France. It was only from France that aid could reach the Jaco- 
bites, and the war with France at once revived their hopes. Charles 
Edward, the grandson of James the Second, was placed by the French 
Government at the head of a formidable armament in 1744 ; but his 
plan of a descent on Scotland was defeated by a storm which wrecked 
his fleet, and by the march of the French troops which had embarked 
in it to the war in Flanders. In 1745 however, the young adventurer 
again embarked with but seven friends in a small vessel and landed on 
a little island of the Hebrides. For three weeks he stood almost 
alone ; but on the 29th of August the clans rallied to his standard in 
Glenfinnan, and Charles found himself at the head of fifteen hundred 
men. His force swelled to an army as he marched through Blair 
Athol on Perth, entered Edinburgh in triumph, and proclaimed " James 
the Eighth^' at the Town Cross. Two thousand English troops 
who marched against him under Sir John Cope were broken and cut 
to pieces on the 21st of September by a single charge of the clans- 
men at Preston Pans, and victory at once doubled the forces of the 
conqueror. The Prince was now at the head of six thousand men, bu^ 
all were still Highlanders, for the people of the Lowlands held alooi 
from his standard. It was with the utmost difficulty that he could 
induce them to follow him to the south. His tact and energy how- 
ever at last conquered all obstacles, and after skilfully evading an i 
army gathered at Newcastle he marched through Lancashire and 
pushed on the 4th of December as far as Derby. But all hope of 



x.i 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



725 



success was at an end. Hardly a man rose in his support as he 
passed through the districts where Jacobitism boasted of its strength. 
The people flocked to see his march as if to see a show. Catholics 
and Tories abounded in Lancashire, but only a single squire took up 
arms. Manchester was looked on as the most Jacobite of English 
towns, but all the aid it gave was an illumination and two thousand 
pounds. From Carhsle to Derby he had been joined by hardly two 
hundred men. The poHcy of Walpole had in fact secured England 
for the House of Hanover. The long peace, the prosperity of the 
country, and the clemency of the Government, had done their work. 
J acobitism as a fighting force was dead, and even Charles Edward saw- 
that it was hopeless to conquer England with five thousand High- 
landers. He soon learnt too that forces of double his own strength 
were closing on either side of him, while a third army under the 
King and Lord Stair covered London. Scotland itself, now that the 
Highlanders were away, quietly renewed in all the districts of the 
Lowlands its allegiance to the House of Hanover. Even in the High- 
lands the Macleods rose in arms for King George, while the Gordons 
refused to stir, though roused by a small French force which landed at 
Montrose. To advance further south w^as impossible, and Charles fell 
rapidly back on Glasgow ; but the reinforcements which he found 
there raised his army to nine thousand men, and he marched on the 
23rd of January, 1746, on the Enghsh army under General Hawley 
which had followed his retreat and encamped near Falkirk. Again 
the wild charge of his Highlanders won victory for the Prince, but 
victory was as fatal as defeat. The bulk of his forces dispersed with 
their booty to the mountains, and Charles fell sullenly back to the 
north before the Duke of Cumberland. On the i6th of April, the 
two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward 
of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but 
they were starving and dispirited. Cumberland's force was nearly 
double that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen 
flung themselves in their old fashion on the English front ; but they 
were received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke 
through the first fine found themselves fronted by a second. In a few 
moments all was over, and the Highlanders a mass of hunted fugitives. 
Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France. In 
England fifty of his followers were hanged, three Scotch lords, Lovat, 
Balmerino, and Kilmarnock, brought to the block, and forty persons of 
rank attainted by Act of Parliament. More extensive measures of 
repression were needful in the Highlands. The feudal tenures were 
abolished. The hereditary jurisdictions of the chiefs were bought up 
and transferred to the Cro^vn. The tartan, or garb of the clansmen, 
was forbidden by law. These measures, followed by a general Act of 
Indemnity, proved effective for their purpose. The dread of the 



726 



NIS70RY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. I. ! clansmen passed away, and the sheriff's v/rit soon ran through the 
Highlands with as little resistance as in the streets of Edinburgh. 

On the Continent the war still lingered on, though its original pur- 
pose had disappeared. The victories of Maria Theresa in Italy were 
balanced by those of France in the Netherlands, where Marshal Saxe 
inflicted on the English and Dutch the defeats of Roucoux and 
Lauffeld. The danger of Holland and the financial exhaustion of 
France at last brought about in 1748 the conclusion of a Peace at 
Aix-la-Chapelle, by which both parties restored their conquests ; and 
with this peace the active work of the Pelham Ministry came to an 
end. Utter inaction settled down over political life, and turnpike bills 
or acts for the furtherance of trade engaged the attention of Parlia- 
ment till the death of Henry Pelham in 1754. But abroad things v/ere 
less quiet. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelie was in fact a mere truce 
forced on the contending powers by sheer exhaustion. France was 
dreaming of far wider schemes for the humiliation of England. The 
troubled question of the trade with America had only been waived by 
Spain. The two powers of the House of Bourbon were still united 
by the Family Compact, and as early as 1752 the Queen of Hungary 
by a startling change of policy had secretly drawn to their alhance. 
Neither Maria Theresa nor Saxony in fact had ever really abandoned 
the design for the recovery of Silesia and for a partition of Prussia. The 
jealousy which Russia entertained of the growth of a strong power in 
North Germany, brought the Czarina Elizabeth to promise aid to their 
scheme ; and in 1755 the league of these three powers with France 
and Spain was silently completed. So secret were these negotia- 
tions that they had utterly escaped the notice of the Duke of 
Newcastle, the brother of Henry Pelham, and his successor in the 
direction of English affairs ; but they were detected from the first 
by the keen eye of Frederick of Prussia, who found himself face to 
face with a line of foes which stretched from Paris to St. Petersburg. 

The danger to England was hardly less. France appeared again on 
the stage with a vigour and audacity which recalled the days of Lewis 
the Fourteenth. The weakness and corruption of its government were 
hidden for the time by the daring scope of its plans and the ability of 
the agents it found to carry them out. The aims of France spread far 
beyond Europe. In India, a French adventurer was founding a French 
Empire, and planning the expulsion of the English merchants from 
their settlements along the coast. In America, France not only 
claimed the valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, but for- 
bade the English Colonists to cross the Alleghanies, and planted Fort 
Duquesne on the waters of the Ohio. The disastrous repulse of 
General Braddock, who had marched on this fort in 1755 with a small 
force of regulars and Colonial Militia, awoke even Newcastle to his 
danger ; and the alliance between England and Prussia at the close of 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



727 



the year gave the signal for the Seven Years' War. No war has had 
greater results on the history of the world or brought greater triumphs 1 
to England ; but few have had more disastrous beginnings. Newcastle 
was too weak and ignorant to rule without aid, and yet too greedy of 
power to purchase aid by sharing it with more capable men. His pre- 
parations for the gigantic struggle before him may be guessed from 
the fact that there were but three regiments fit for service in England 
at the opening of 1756. France on the other hand was quick in her 
attack. Port Mahon in Minorca, the key of the Mediterranean, was 
besieged by the Duke of Richelieu and forced to capitulate. To com- 
plete the shame of England, a fleet sent to its relief under Admiral 
Byng retreated before the French. In Germany Frederick had seized 
Dresden at the outset of the war, and forced the Saxon army to 
surrender ; and in 1757 his victory at Prague made him master of 
Bohemia ; but a defeat at Kolin drove him to retreat again into 
Saxony. In the same year the Duke of Cumberland, who had taken 
post on the Weser with an army of fifty thousand men for the defence 
of Hanover, fell back before a French army to the mouth of the 
Elbe, and engaged by the Convention of Closter-Seven to disband his 
forces. A despondency without parallel in our history took possession 
of our coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in 
despair, " We are no longer a nation." 

But the nation of which Chesterfield despaired was really on the 
eve of its greatest triumphs, and the miserable incapacity of the Duke 
of Newcastle only called to the Iront the genius of William Pitt. 
Pitt was the son of a wealthy governor of Madras, who had entered 
Parliament in 1734 as member for one of his father^s pocket boroughs, 
and had at once headed the younger " Patriots " in their attack on 
Walpole. His fiery spirit had been hushed in office during the 
^^broad-bottom administration'' which followed the Minister's fall, 
but the death of Henry Pelham again replaced him at the head of 
the opposition. The first disaster of the war drove Newcastle from 
office, and in November 1756 Pitt became Secretary of State ; but 
in four months he was forced to resign, and Newcastle reappointed. 
In July 1757 however, it was necessary to recall him. The failure of 
Newcastle's administration forced the Duke to a junction with his rival ; 
and fortunately for their country, the character of the two statesmen 
made the compromise an easy one. For all that Pitt coveted, for the 
general direction of public affairs, the control of foreign policy, the 
administration of the war, Newcastle had neither capacity nor incli- 
nation. On the other hand, his skill in parliamentary management 
was unrivalled. If he knew little else, he knew better than any living 
man the price of every member and the intrigues of every borough. 
What he cared for was not the control of affairs, but the distribu- 
tion of patronage and the work of corruption, and from this Pitt 



Sec, I. 



728 



HISTORY OF THE EMGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap, 



turned disdainfully away. " Mr. Pitt does everything," wrote Horace 
Walpole, "and the Duke gives everything. So long as they agree 
in this partition they may do what they please." Out of the union 
of these two strangely contrasted leaders, in fact, rose the greatest, as 
it was the last, of the purely Whig administrations. But its real power 
lay from beginning to end in Pitt himself. Poor as he was, for his 
income was little more than two hundred a year, and springing as he 
did from a family of no political importance, it was by sheer dint of 
genius that the young cornet of horse, at whose youth and inexperience 
Walpole had sneered, seized a power which the Whig houses had ever 
since the Revolution kept jealously in their grasp. His ambition had 
no petty aim. " I want to call England," he said as he took office, 
" out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand men from France 
can shake her." His call was soon answered. He at once breathed 
his own lofty spirit into the country he served, as he communicated 
something of his own grandeur to the men who served him. "No man," 
said a soldier of the time, " ever entered Mr. Pitf s closet who did not feel 
himself braver when he came out than when he went in." Ill-combined 
as were his earlier expeditions, many as were his failures, he roused a 
temper in the nation at large which made ultimate defeat impossible. 
" England has been a long time in labour," exclaimed Frederick of 
Prussia as he recognized a greatness like his own, " but she has at last 
brought forth a man." 

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as 
we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action 
stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of 
a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of 
simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and 
of head, sceptical of virtue and enthusiasm, sceptical above all of 
itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his 
passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, 
his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty 
self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more 
puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he 
appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which 
he turned from a corruption which had till then been the great 
engine of poHtics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the 
grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. " I know 
that I can save the country," he said to the Duke of Devonshire on 
his entry into the Ministry, " and I know no other man can." The 
groundwork of Pitt's character was an intense and passionate pride ; 
but it was a pride which kept him from stooping to the level of the 
men who had so long held England in their hands. He was the first 
statesman since the Restoration who set the example of a purely 
public spirit. Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused I 



x.i 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



1^^ 



office so often, or accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles 
he professed. " I will not go to Court/^ he replied to an offer which 
was made him, " if I may not bring the Constitution with me.'' For 
the corruption about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to 
Newcastle the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the 
outset of his career Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office 
in his administration, that of Paymaster of the Forces ; but its profits 
vere of an ilhcit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused to accept 
one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never appeared in loftier 
and nobler form than in his attitude towards the people at large. No 
leader had ever a wider popularity than " the great commoner,'' as 
Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who commands 
popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter 
popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for 
" Wilkes and liberty," he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate ; 
and when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt 
haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been 
the first to enlist on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, his flashing 
eye, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur of his eloquence, gave 
him a sway over the House of Commons far greater than any other 
Minister has possessed. He could silence an opponent with a look of 
scorn, or hush the whole House with a single v/ord. But he never 
stooped to the arts by which men form a political party, and at the 
height of his power his personal following hardly numbered half a 
dozen members. 

His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament but in the people 
at large. His significant title of "the great commoner" marks a 
political revolution. " It is the people who have sent me here," Pitt 
boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the Cabinet opposed 
his will. He was the first to see that the long political inactivity of 
the public mind had ceased, and that the progress of commerce and 
industry had produced a great middle class, which no longer found its 
representatives in the legislature. " You have taught me," said George 
the Second when Pitt sought to save Byng by appealing to the senti- 
ment of Parliament, " to look for the voice of my people in other places 
than within the House of Commons." It was this unrepresented class 
which had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle 
the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and 
addresses of confidence. " For weeks," laughs Horace Walpole, " it 
rained gold boxes." London stood by him through good report and 
evil report, and the wealthiest of English merchants, Alderman Beck- 
ford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant. The temper of 
Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the temper of the commercial 
England which rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence, 
its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. The 



730 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural attraction to the one 
statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were 
clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection for wife and 
child. But there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic 
reverence and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever 
since. He loved England with an intense and personal love. He 
believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learnt 
to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his 
defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought of self or party- 
spirit. " Be one people,'^ he cried to the factions who rose to bring 
about his fall : "forget everything but the public ! I set you the 
example !'' His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he held 
England. Even the faults which chequered his character told for him 
with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had 
been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and 
absence of pretence. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the 
cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted business with 
his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love 
for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits 
of his day to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic 
appearance which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed 
in flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered 
at him for bringing into the House of Commons "the gestures and 
emotions of the stage." But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were 
classes not easily offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh 
at in the statesman who was borne into the lobby amidst the tortures 
of the gout or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last in a 
protest against national dishonour. 

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The 
power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates 
of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by 
the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung 
off by the age of the Revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers 
and his rivals we see ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness 
of expression, precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or 
the man of business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this 
clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready 
debater like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. 
His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his want of 
taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and extravagant meta- 
phors came at once to the front. That with defects like these he stood 
far above every orator of his time was due above all to his profound 
conviction, to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. " I 
must sit still,^' he whispered once to a friend, " for when once I am up 
everything that is in my mind comes out." But the reality of liis 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



IV- 



eloquence was transfigured by a glow of passion which not only raised 
him high above the men of his own day but set him in the front rank 
among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the 
common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a large 
and poetic imagination, a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained 
grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of human 
feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to 
the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. 
Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of the 
speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was in fact, 
the first English orator whose words were a power, a power not over 
Parliament only but over the nation at large. Parliamentary reporting 
was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached phrases and half- 
remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt reached beyond the walls 
of St. Stephen's. But it was especially in these sudden outbursts of 
inspiration, in these brief passionate appeals, that the power of his 
eloquence lay. The few broken words we have of him stir the same 
thrill in our day which they stirred in the men of his own. 

But passionate as was Pitt's eloquence, it was the eloquence of a 
statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his greater 
struggles, his defence of the liberty of the subject against arbitrary 
imprisonment under " general warrants,'' of the liberty of the press 
against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against the House 
of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against England 
itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of Prussia, 
and Prussia has at last vindicated his foresight by the creation of 
Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of^ 
India by the Crown, plans which when he proposed them were regarded 
as insane. Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the 
Church of England, its " Calvinistic Articles and Arminian Liturgy ;" he 
was the first to sound the note of Parhamentary reform. One of his 
earliest measures shows the generosity and originality of his mind. 
He quieted Scotland by employing its Jacobites in the service of their 
country and by raising Highland regiments among its clans. The 
selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals showed his contempt for 
precedent and his inborn knowledge of men. There was little indeed in 
the military expeditions with which Pitt's Ministry opened to justify his 
fame. Money and blood were lavished on buccaneering descents upon 
the French coasts which did small damage to the enemy. But in 
Europe Pitt wisely limited himself to a secondary part. He recog- 
Qized the genius of Frederick the Great, and resolved to give him 
a firm and energetic support. The Convention of Closter-Seven 
had almost reduced Frederick to despair. But the moment of 
Pitt's accession to power was marked on the King's part by the 
most brilliant display of military genius which the modern world 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



had as yet seen. Two months after his repulse at Kohn he 
flung himself on a l^rench army which advanced into the heart 
of Germany and annihilated it in the victory of Rossbach. Before 
another month had passed he hurried from the Saale to the Oder, 
and by a yet more signal victory at Leuthen cleared Silesia of the 
Austrians. But these prodigious efforts would have been useless but 
for the aid of Pitt. The English Minister poured subsidy upon 
subsidy into Frederick's exhausted treasury, while he refused to 
ratify the Convention of Closter-Seven, and followed the King's 
advice by setting the Prince of Brunswick at the head of the army 
on the Elbe. 

The victory of Rossbach was destined to change the fortunes of 
the world by bringing about the unity of Germany ; but the year of 
Rossbach was the year of a victory hardly less important in the East. 
The genius and audacity of a merchant-clerk made a company of 
English traders the sovereigns of Bengal, and opened that wondrous 
career of conquest which has added the Indian peninsula, from Ceylon 
to the Himalayas, to the dominions of the British crown. The early 
intercourse of England with India gave little promise of the great 
fortunes which awaited it. It was not till the close of Elizabeth's 
reign, a century after Vasco da Gama had crept round the Cape 
of Good Hope and founded Jihe Portuguese settlements on the Goa 
coast, that an East India Company was founded in London. The 
trade, profitable as it was, remained small in extent, and the three 
early factories of the Company were only gradually acquired during 
the century which followed. The first, that of Madras, consisted of 
but six fishermen's houses beneath Fort St. George ; that of Bombay 
was ceded by the Portuguese as part of the dowry of Catherine of 
Braganza ; while Fort William, with the mean village which has 
since grown into Calcutta, ov/es its origin to the reign of William 
the Third. Each of these forts was built simply for the protection 
of the Company's warehouses, and guarded by a few " sepahis," 
sepoys, or paid native soldiers ; while the clerks and traders of each 
establishment were under the direction of a President and a Council. 
One of these clerks in the middle of the eighteenth century was Robert 
Clive, the son of a small proprietor near Market Drayton in Shrop- 
shire, an idle dare-devil of a boy whom his friends had been glad 
to get rid of by packing him off in the Company's service as a 
writer to Madras. His early days there were days of wretchedness 
and despair. He was poor and cut off from his fellows by the haughty 
shyness of his temper, weary of desk-work, and haunted by home 
I sickness. Twice he attempted suicide ; and it was only on the failure 
1 of his second attempt that he flung down the pistol which baffled him 
I with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things. 
! A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



733 



as the war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of 
the French in power and influence tempted them to expel the Eng- 
lish from India. Labourdonnais, the governor of the French 
colony of the Mauritius, besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, 
and carried its clerks and merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. 
Clive was among these captives, but he escaped in disguise, and 
returning to the settlement threw aside his clerkship for an ensign's 
commission in the force which the Company was busily raising. For 
the capture of Madras had not only established the repute of the 
French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of Pondicherry, 
to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in India. When 
the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods to Surat, 
all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first time under 
ihe rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the line of 
Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne, the 
Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised them- 
selves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor 
founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the 
Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied 
by a race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan 
invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, 
the capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who 
were known under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the 
natives whom conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from 
the highlands along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and 
Tanjore, and finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior. 
Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He 
offered his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who 
had reduced his power to a shadow ; and it was in the Emperor's 
name that he meddled with the quarrels of the states of Central 
and Southern India, made himself virtually master of the court of 
Hyderabad, and seated a creature of his own on the throne of the 
Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one town which held out against this 
Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but brought to surrender when Clive, 
in 175 1, came forward with a daring scheme for its relief. With a 
few hundred English and sepoys he pushed through a thunderstorm 
to the surprise of Arcot, the Nabob's capital, entrenched himself; 
in its enormous fort, and held it for fifty days against thousands of | 
assailants. Moved by his gallantry, the Mahrattas, who had never 
believed that Englishmen would fight before, advanced and broke up 
the siege ; but Clive was no sooner freed than he showed equal 
vigour in the field. At the head of raw recruits who ran av/ay at 
the first sound of a gun, and sepoys who hid themselves as soon 
as the cannon opened fire, he twice attacked and defeated the French 
and their Indian allies, foiled every effort of DunJleix, and razed to 



734 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap 



the ground a pompous pillar which the French governor had set m\ 
in honour of his earlier victories. 

Recalled by broken health to England, Clive returned at the out 
break of the Seven Years' War to win for England a greater prize 
than that which his victories had won for it in the supremacy of the 
Carnatic. He had only been a few months at Madras when a crime 
whose horror still lingers in English memories called him to Beng^al 
Bengal, the delta of the Ganges, was the richest and most fertik 
of ail the provinces of India. Its rice, its sugar, its silk, anc 
the produce of its looms, were famous in European markets. Its 
Viceroys, like their fellow lieutenants, had become practically inde 
pendent of the Emperor, and had added to Bengal the provinces O' 
Orissa and Behar. Surajah Dowlah, the master of this vast domain 
had long been jealous of the enterprise and wealth of the Englisl 
traders ; and, roused at this moment by the instigation of the French 
he appeared before Fort William, seized its settlers, and thrust i 
hundred and fifty of them into a small prison called the Black Hole 
ot Calcutta. The heat of an Indian summer did its work of death 
The wretched prisoners trampled each other unaer foot in the mad- 
ness of thirst, and in the morning only twenty-three remained alive. 
Clive sailed at the news with a thousand Englishmen and two thou 
sand sepoys to wreak vengeance for the crime. He was no longer 
the boy-soldier of Arcot; and the tact and skill with which he met 
Surajah Dowlah in the negotiations by which the Viceroy strove 
to avert a conflict were sullied by the Oriental falsehood and treachery 
to which he stooped. But hi'S courage remained unbroken. When 
the two armies faced each other on the plain of Plassey the odds were 
so great that on the very eve of the battle a council of war counselled 
retreat. Clive withdrew to a grove hard by, and after an hour's lonely 
musing gave the word to fight. Courage, in fact, was all that was 
needed. The fifty thousand foot and fourteen thousand horse who 
were seen covering the plain at daybreak on the 23rd of June, 1757, 
were soon thrown into confusion by the English guns, and broke in 
headlong rout before the English charge. The death of Surajah 
Dowlah enabled the Company to place a creature of its own on the 
throne of Bengal ; but his rule soon became a nominal one. With 
the victory of Plassey began in fact the Empire of England in the 
East. 

In Germany, the news of Rossbach called the French from the 
Elbe back to the Rhine in the opening of 1758. Ferdinand of Bruns- 
wick, reinforced with twenty thousand EngHsh soldiers, held them 
at bay during the summer, while Frederick, foiled in an attack on 
Moravia, drove the Russians back on Poland in the battle of Zomdorf. 
His defeat, however, by the Austrian General Daun at Hochkirch, 
proved the first of a series of terrible misfortunes. The year 1759 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



735 



marks the lowest point of Frederick's fortunes. A fresh advance of 
the Russian army forced the King to attack it at Kunersdorf in August, 
and his repulse ended in the utter rout of his army. For the moment 
all seemed lost, for even Berlin lay open to the conqueror. A few 
days later the surrender of Dresden gave Saxony to the Austrians ; 
and at the close of the year an attempt upon them at Plauen was 
foiled with terrible loss. But every disaster was retrieved by the 
indomitable courage and tenacity of the King, and winter found him 
as before master of Silesia and of all Saxony save the ground which 
Daun's camp covered. The year which marked the lowest point of 
Frederick's fortunes was the year of Pitt's greatest triumphs, the year 
of Minden and Quiberon and Quebec. France aimed both at a 
descent upon England and the conquest of Hanover, and gathered a 
naval armament at Brest, while fifty thousand men under Contades 
and Broglie united on the Weser. Ferdinand with less than forty 
thousand met them (August i) on the field of Minden. The French 
marched along the Weser to the attack, with their flanks protected 
by that river and a brook which ran into it, and with their cavalry, 
ten thousand strong, massed in the centre. The six English regi- 
ments in Ferdinand's army fronted the French horse, and, mistaking 
their general's order, marched at once upon them in line, regardless of 
the batteries on their flank, and rolling back charge after charge with 
volleys of musketry. In an hour the French centre was utterly broken. 
" I have seen," said Contades, " what I never thought to be possible — a 
single line, of infantry break through three lines of cavalry, ranked 
in order of battle, and tumble them to ruin ! " Nothing but the refusal 
of Lord George Sackville to complete the victory by a charge of 
Ferdinand's horse saved the French from utter rout. As it was, their 
army again fell back broken on Frankfort and the Rhine. The pro- 
ject of an invasion of England met with the same success. Eighteen 
thousand men lay ready to embark on board the French fleet, when 
Admiral Hawke came in sight of it on the 20th of November, at the 
mouth of Quiberon Bay. The sea was rolling high, and the coast 
where the French ships lay was so dangerous from its shoals and 
granite reefs that the pilot remonstrated with the English admiral 
against his project of attack. " You have done your duty in this 
remonstrance," Hawke coolly replied ; " now lay me alongside the 
French admiral." Two English ships were lost on the shoals, but the 
French fleet was ruined and the disgrace of Byng's retreat wiped 
away. 

It was not in the Old World only that the year of Minden and 
Quiberon brought glory to the arms of England. In Europe, Pitt 
had wisely limited his efl'orts to the support of Prussia, but across the 
Atlantic the field was wholly his own. The French dominion in 
North America, which was originally confined to Cape Breton and 



Sec. I. 



7i" 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Canada, had been pushed by the activity of the Marquis of Mont- 
calm along the great chain of lakes towards the Ohio and the 
Mississippi. Three strong forts, that of Duquesne on the Ohio, that of 
Niagara on the St. Lawrence, and that of Ticonderoga on Lake Cham- 
plain, supported by a chain of less important posts, threatened to cut 
off the English colonies of the coast from any possibility of extension 
over the prairies of the West. Montcalm was gifted with singular 
powers of administration ; he had succeeded in attaching the bulk of 
the Indian tribes from Canada as far as the Mississippi to the cause 
of his nation, and the value of their aid had been shown in the rout 
of the British detachment which General Braddock led against Fort 
Duquesne. But Pitt had no sooner turned his attention to American 
affairs than these desultory raids were superseded by a large and com- 
prehensive plan of attack. A combined expedition under Amherst and 
Boscawen captured Louisburg in 1758, and reduced the colony of 
Cape Breton at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. The American militia 
supported the British troops in a vigorous campaign against the forts, 
and though Montcalm was able to repulse General Abercromby 
from Ticonderoga, a force from Philadelphia made itself master of 
Duquesne. The name of Pittsburg which was given to their new 
conquest still commemorates the enthusiasm of the colonists for the 
great Minister who first opened to them the West. The next year 
(1759) saw the evacuation of Ticonderoga before the advance of Am- 
herst, and the capture of Fort Niagara after the defeat of an Indian 
force which marched to its relief. But Pitt had resolved not merely 
to foil the ambition of Montcalm but to destroy the French rule in 
America altogether ; and while Amherst was breaking through the 
line of forts, an expedition under General Wolfe entered the St. 
Lawrence and anchored below Quebec. Pitt had discerned the 
genius and heroism which lay hidden beneath the awkward manner 
and the occasional gasconade of the young soldier of thirty-three 
whom he chose for the crowning exploit of the war, but for a while his 
sagacity seemed to have failed. No efforts could draw Montcalm 
from the long line of inaccessible cliffs which at this point borders the 
river, and for six weeks Wolfe saw his men wasting away in inactivity 
while he himself lay prostrate with sickness and despair. At last his 
resolution was fixed, and in a long line of boats the army dropped 
down the St. Lawrence to a point at the base of the Heights of 
Abraham, where a narrow path had been discovered to the summit. 
Not a voice broke the silence of the night save the voice of Wolff 
himself, as he quietly repeated the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a 
Country Churchyard,^' remarking as he closed, " I had rather be the 
author of that poem than take Quebec." But his nature was as brave 
as it was tender ; he was the first to leap on shore and to scale the 
narrow path where no two men could go abreast. His men follow^ 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



p-ulling themselves to the top by the help of bushes and the crags, 
and at daybreak on the 12th of September the whole army stood 
in orderly formation before Quebec. Wolfe headed a charge which 
broke the lines of Montcalm, but a ball pierced his breast in the moment 
of victory. " They run,'^ cried an officer who held the dying man in 
his arms — '^ I protest they run.'' Wolfe rallied to ask who they were 
that ran, and was told " the French." ^^ Then," he murmured, " I 
die happy ! " The fall of Montcalm in the moment of his defeat 
completed the victory, and the submission of Canada put an end to the 
dream of a French empire in America. In breaking through the line 
with which France had striven to check the westward advance of the 
English colonists Pitt had unconsciously changed the history of the 
world. His support of Frederick and of Prussia was to lead in our 
own day to the creation of a United Germany. His conquest of Canada, 
by removing the enemy whose dread knit the colonists to the mother 
country and by flinging open to their energies in the days to come the 
boundless plains of the West, laid the foundation of the United States. 

Section II..— The Independence of America. 1761—1785. 

\_Atithorities. — The two sides of the American quarrel have been told with the 
same purpose of fairness and truthfulness, though with a very different bias, by 
Lord Stanhope (" History of England from Peace of Utrecht"), and Mr. Ban- 
croft (** History of the United States"). The latter is by far the more detailed 
and picturesque, the former perhaps the cooler and more impartial of the two 
narratives. To the authorities for England itself given in the last section we 
may add here Mr. Massey's valuable " History of England from the Accession 
of George the Third " ; Walpole's ** Memoirs of the Early Reign of George the 
Third ;" the Rockingham Memoirs ; the Grenville Papers ; the Bedford Coi*- 
respondence ; the correspondence of George the Third with Lord North ; the 
Letters of Junius ; and Lord Russell's *' Life and Correspondence of C. J. Fox.'^ 
Burke's speeches and pamphlets during this period, above all his ** Thoughts 
on the Causes of the Present Discontents," are indispensable for any real know- 
ledge of it. The Constitutional History of Sir Erskine May opens with this 
time, and all but compensates us, in its fulness and impartiality and acuteness, 
for the loss of Mr. Hallam's invaluable comments. ] 



England had never played so great a part in the history of man- 
kind as now. The year 1759 ^^.s a year of triumphs in every quarter 
of the world. In September came the news of Minden, and of a 
victory off Lagos. In October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. 
November brought word of the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are 
forced to ask every morning what victory there is/' laughed Horace 
VValpole, " for fear of missing one." But it was not so much in the 
number as in the importance of its triumphs that the war stood and 
remains still without a rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three 
of its many victories determined for ages to come the destinies 

3 B 



738 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. II. 

The Inde- 
pendence 

OF 

America. 
1761- 
1785. 



The 
American 
Colonies. 



of the world. With that of Rossbach began the recreation of Germany, 
its intellectual supremacy over Europe, its political union under 
the leadership of Prussia and its kings. With that of Plassey the 
influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alex- 
ander on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous 
phrase, saw "one of the races of the north-east cast into the heart of 
Asia new manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph 
of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United 
States of America. 

The progress of the American colonies from the time when 
the Puritan emigration added the four New England States, 
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island 
to those of Maryland and Virginia had been slow, but it had never 
ceased. Settlers still came, though in smaller numbers, and two 
new colonies south of Virginia received from Charles the Second 
their name of the Carolinas. The war with Holland transferred to 
British rule the district claimed by the Dutch from the Hudson to the 
inner Lakes, and the country was at once granted by Charles to his 
brother, and received from him the name of New York. Portions were 
soon broken off from this vast territory to form the colonies of New Jersey 
and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed William Penn 
across the Delaware into the heart of the primaeval forest, and became a 
colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands in which he planted 
it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed before a new 
settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the reigning sove- 
reign, George the Second, was established by General Oglethorpe on 
the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the persecuted 
Protestants of Germany. Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies 
were really growing fast in numbers and in wealth. Their population at 
the accession of George the Third was little less than a million and 
a half, a fourth of the population of the mother country. Their 
wealth had risen even faster than their numbers. Half a million of 
slaves were employed in tilling the rice-fields of Georgia, the indigo 
fields of the Carolinas, and the tobacco plantations of Virginia. New 
York and Pennsylvania grew rich from corn-harvests and the timber 
trade. But the distinction between the Northern and Southern colonies 
was more than an industrial one. In the Southern States the pre- 
valence of slavery produced an aristocratic spirit and favoured the 
creation of large estates. Even the system of entails had been intro- 
duced among the wealthy planters of Virginia, where many of thei 
older English families found representatives in houses such as those 
of Fairfax and Washington. Throughout New England, on the other 
hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their piety, their intolerance, 
their simplicity of life, their love of equally and tendency to democratic 
institutions, remained unchanged. In education and political activit) 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



739 



New England stood far ahead of its fellow colonies, for the settlement 
of the Puritans had been followed at once by the establishment of a 
system of local schools which is still the glory of America. ^' Ever>^ 
township," it was enacted, " after the Lord hath increased them to the 
number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to 
write and read ; and when any town shall increase to the number of 
a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school." 

Great, however, as these differences were, and great as was to be 
their influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In 
the main features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies 
stood fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them 
contrasted sharply with the England at home. Religious tolerance had 
been brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world 
had never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In 
Virginia the bulk of the settlers clung to the Episcopalian Church. 
Roman Catholics formed a large part of the population of Maryland. 
Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers. Presbyterians and Baptists had 
fled from tests and persecutions to colonize New Jersey. Lutherans 
and Moravians from Germany abounded among the settlers of Carolina 
and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds religious persecution or an 
Established Church were equally impossible. There was the same 
real unity in the political tendency and organization of the States as in 
the religious. Whether the temper of the colony was democratic, 
moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government was pretty much 
the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the projector and 
grantee of the earliest settlement, had in every case either ceased 
to exist or fallen into desuetude. The government of each colony 
lay in a House of Assembly elected by the people at large, with a 
Council sometimes elected, sometimes nominated by the Governor, and 
a Governor appointed by the Crown. With the appointment of the 
Governor all administrative interference on the part of the Government 
at home practically ended. The colonies were left by a happy neglect 
to themselves. It was wittily said at a later day, that " Mr. Grenville 
lost America because he read the American despatches, which none of 
his predecessors ever did." There was little room, indeed, for any 
interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were 
secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies had the sole right of 
internal taxation, and exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt, 
afterwards set roughly aside the project for an American excise. 
"I have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, 
and do you think I will have New England too?" Even in matters 
of trade the supremacy of the mother country was far from being a 
galling one. There were some small import duties, but they were evaded 
by a well-understood system of smuggling. The restriction of trade 
with the colonies to Great Britain was more than compensated by the 

3 B 2 



74^ 



HISTORY OF THE EI^GLISH PEOPX^E. 



[Chap. 



commercial privileges which the Americans enjoyed 35 iPritish subjects. 
As yet, therefore, there was nothing to break the good will which the 
colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French 
aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, the 
English settlements still lay mainly along the sea-board of the Atlantic. 
Only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before 
the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned 
along the lakes. It was by his success in winning over these tribes 
to an acknowledgment of the supremacy of France that Montcalm 
was drawn to the project of extending the French dominion over the 
broad plains of the Ohio and the Missouri from Canada to the 
Mississippi, and of cutting off the English colonies from all access 
to the West. The instinct of the settlers taught them that in such 
a project lay the death-blow of America's future greatness ; the 
militia of the colonies marched with Braddock to his fatal defeat, 
and shared with the troops of Amherst the capture of Duquesne. 
The name of " Pittsburg," which they gave to their prize, still recalls 
the gratitude of the colonists to the statesman whose genius had rolled 
away the danger which threatened their destinies. 

But strong as the attachment of the colonists to the mother 
country seemed at this nioment, there were keen politicians who saw 
in the very completeness of Pitf s triumph a danger to their future 
union. The presence of the French in Canada had thrown the colonies 
on the protection of Qreat Britain. With the conquest of Canada theit 
need of this protection was removed. For the moment, however, ail 
thought of distant result was lost in the nearer fortunes of the war. 
In Germany the steady support of Pitt alone enabled Frederick to hold 
out against the terrible exhaustion of his unequal struggle. His 
campaign of 1760 indeed was one of the grandest efforts of his-genius. 
Foiled in an attempt on Dresden, he again saved Silesia by his victory 
of Liegnitz and hurled back an advance of Daun by a victory at 
Torgau ; while Ferdinand of Brunswick held his ground as of old 
along the Weser. But even victories drained Frederick's strength. 
Men and money alike failed him. It was impossible for him to strike 
another great blov/, and the ring of enemies again closed slowly 
round him. His one remaining hope lay in the firm support of Pitt, 
and triumphant as his policy had been, Pitt was tottering to his fall. 
The envy and resentment of his colleagues at his undisguised 
supremacy found an unexpected supporter in the young sovereign 
who mounted the throne on the death of his grandfather in 1760. 
For the first and last time, since the accession of the House of Hanover 
England saw a king who was resolved to play a part in English 
politics ; and the part which George the Third succeeded in playing 
was undoubtedly a memorable one. In ten years he reduced 
government to a shadow, and turned the loyalty of his subjects 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



741 



into disaffection. In twenty he had forced the colonies of America 
into revolt and independence, and brought England to the brink of 
ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great 
men, and often by very wicked and profligate men ; but George 
was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any 
English king before him save James the Second. He was wretchedly 
educated, and his natural taste was of the meanest sort. " Was there 
ever such stuff," he asked, *' as Shakspere .^ " Nor had he the capacity 
for using greater minds than his own by which some sovereigns have 
concealed their natural littleness. On the contrary, his only feeling 
towards great men was one of jealousy and hate. He longed for the 
time when " decrepitude or death " might put an end to Pitt, and 
even when death had freed him from " this trumpet of sedition," he 
denounced the proposal for a public monument as " an offensive measure 
to me personally.'' But dull and petty as his temper was, he was 
clear as to his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it. And his 
purpose was to rule. " George,'^ his mother, the Princess of Wales, 
had continually repeated to him in youth, " George, be king." He 
called himself always '^ a Whig of the Revolution," and he had no 
wish to undo the work which he believed the Revolution to have done. 
His wish was not to govern against law, but simply to govern, to be freed 
from the dictation of parties and ministers, to be in effect the first 
minister of the State. How utterly incompatible such a dream was 
with the Parliamentary constitution of the country as it had received 
its final form from Sunderland we have already seen, but George was 
resolved to carry out his dream. And in carrying it out he was aided 
by the circumstances of the time. The defeat of Charles Edward and 
the later degradation of his life had worn away the thin coating of 
Jacobitism which clung to the Tories. They were ready again to take 
part in politics, and in the accession of a king who unlike his two 
predecessors was no stranger but an Englishman, who had been born 
in England and spoke English, they found the opportunity they desired. 
Their withdrawal from public affairs had left them untouched by the 
progress of political ideas since the Revolution of 1688, and they 
returned to invest the new sovereign with all the reverence which 
they had bestowed on the Stuarts. A 'Mving's party" was thus 
ready made to his hand ; but George was able to strengthen it 
by a vigorous exertion of the power and influence which was still 
left to the Crown. All promotion in the Church, all advance- 
ment in the army, a great number of places in the civil administration 
and about the court, w^ere still at the King's disposal. If this vast 
mass of patronage had been practically usurped by the ministers of 
his predecessors, it was resumed and firmly held by George the Third ; 
and the character of the House of Commons made patronage, as we 
have seen,- a powerful engine in its management. George had one 



742 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



of Walpole's weapons in his hands, and he used it with unscrupulous 
energy to break up the party which Walpole had held so long together. 
He saw that the Whigs were divided among themselves by the factious 
spirit which springs from a long hold of power, and that they were weak- 
ened by the rising contempt with which the country at large regarded the 
selfishness and corruption of its representatives. More than thirty 
years before. Gay had quizzed the leading statesmen of the day on the 
public stage under the guise of highwaymen and pickpockets. " It is 
difficult to determine," said the witty playwright, " whether the fine 
gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the 
road the fine gentlemen." And now that the " fine gentlemen " were 
represented by hoary jobbers such as Newcastle, the public contempt 
was fiercer than ever, and men turned sickened from the intrigues and 
corruption of party to the young sovereign who aired himself in the 
character which Bolinbroke had invented of a Patriot King. 

Had Pitt and Newcastle held together, supported as the one was by 
the commercial classes and public opinion, the other by the Whig 
families and the whole machinery of Parliamentary management, 
George must have struggled in vain. But the ministry was already 
disunited. The Whigs, attached to peace by the traditions of Walpole, 
dismayed at the enormous expenditure, and haughty with the pride of 
a ruling oligarchy, were in silent revolt against the war and the 
supremacy of the Great Commoner. It was against their will 
that Pitt rejected proposals of peace from France on the terms 
of a desertion of Prussia. In 1761 he urged a new war with Spain. 
He had learnt the secret signature of a fresh family compact be- 
tween the two Bourbon Courts of Spain and France, and he proposed 
to anticipate the blow by a seizure of the treasure fleet from the 
Indies, by occupying the Isthmus of Panama, and attacking the 
Spanish dominions in the New World. His colleagues shrank from 
plans so vast and daring : and Newcastle was spurred to revolt by the 
King and backed in it by the rest of the Whigs. It was in vain that 
Pitt enforced his threat of resignation by declaring himself respon- 
sible to " the people," or that the Londoners hung after his dismissal 
from office on his carriage wheels, hugged his footman, and even 
kissed his horses. The fall of the great statesman in October changed 
the whole look of European affairs. " Pitt disgraced," wrote a 
French philosopher, — " it is worth two victories to us ! " Frederick 
on the other hand, was almost driven to despair. George saw 
in the great stateman^s fall nothing but an opening for peace. 
He quickly availed himself of the weakness and unpopularity in 
which the ministry found itself involved after Pitfs departure to 
drive the Duke of Newcastle from office by a series of studied morti- 
fications, and to place the Marquis of Bute at its head. Bute was a 
mere court favourite, with the abilities of a gentleman usher, but he 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



743 



was willing to do the King^s will, and the King's will was to end the 
war. Frederick, who still held his ground stubbornly against fate, 
was brought to the brink of ruin in the spring of 1762 by the with- 
drawal of the English subsidies. It was in fact only his wonderful 
resolution and the sudden change in the policy of Russia which 
followed on the death of his enemy the Czarina Elizabeth which 
enabled him to retire from the struggle in the Treaty of Hubertsberg, 
without the loss of an inch of territory. George and Lord Bute had 
already purchased peace at a very different price. With a shameless 
indifference to the national honour, thsy had even offered Silesia to 
Austria, and East Prussia to the Czarina, in return for a cessation 
of hostilities. Fortunately the issue of the strife with Spain saved 
England from such humiliation as this. Pitf s policy had been vindi- 
cated by a Spanish declaration of v/ar three weeks after his fall ; and 
the surrender of Cuba and the Philippines to a British fleet brought 
about the Peace of Paris in September 1772. England restored Mar- 
tinique, the most important of her West Indian conquests, to France, 
and Cuba and the Philippines to Spain in return for the cession of 
Florida. Her real gains were in India and America. In the first 
the French abandoned all right to any military settlement : in the 
second they gave up Canada and Nova Scotia. 

The anxiety which the young king showed for peace abroad sprang 
simply from his desire to begin the struggle for power at home. So 
long as the war lasted Pitt's return to office and the union of the 
Whigs under his guidance was an hourly danger. But with peace the 
King's hands were free. He could count on the dissensions of the 
Whigs, on the new-born loyalty of the Tories, on the influence of" 
the Crown patronage which he had taken into his own hands ; but 
what he counted on most of all was the character of the House of 
Commons. At a time when it had become all-powerful in the State, 
when government hung simply on its will, the House of Commons 
had ceased in any real and effective sense to represent the Commons 
at all. The changes in the distribution of seats which were called 
for by the natural shiftings of population and wealth since the days of 
Edward the First had been recognized as early as the Civil Wars ; but 
the reforms of the Long Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration. 
From the time of Charles the Second to that of George the Third 
not a single effort had been made to meet the growing abuses of our 
parliamentary system. Great towns like Manchester or Birmingham 
remained without a member, while members still sat for boroughs 
which, like Old Sarum, had actually vanished from the face of the 
earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns to establish a Court party 
in the House by a profuse creation of boroughs, most of which were 
mere villages then in the hands of the Crown, had ended in the 
appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring landowners, who 



The Indk- 

pendenck 



744 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap 



Fall of 
Bute. 



bought and sold them as they sold their own estates. Even in towns 
which had a real claim to representation, the narrowing of municipal 
privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a small part of the in- 
habitants, and in many cases the restriction of electoral rights to the 
members of the governing corporation, rendered their representation 
a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply on the purse or 
influence of politicians. Some were " the King's boroughs," others 
obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the day, others 
were " close boroughs'^ in the hands of jobbers like the Duke of New- 
castle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough members 
in the House. The counties and the great commercial towns could 
alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the 
enormous expense of contesting such constituencies practically left 
their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even 
in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. 
Out of a population in fact of eight millions of English people, only a 
hundred and sixty thousand were electors at all. 

How far such a House was from really representing English opinion 
we see from the fact that in the height of his popularity Pitt could 
hardly find a seat in it. When he did find one, it was at the hands ot 
a great borough-jobber, Lord Clive. Purchase was the real means of 
entering Parliament. Seats were bought and sold in the open market 
at a price which rose to four thousand pounds, and we can hardly wonder 
that the younger Pitt cried indignantly at a later time, " This House 
is not the representative of the People of Great Britain. It is the 
representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and exterminated 
towns, of noble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." 
The meanest motives naturally told on a body returned by such 
constituencies, cut off from the influence of public opinion by the 
secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, and yet invested with almost 
boundless authority. Newcastle had made bribery and borough-jobbing 
the base of the power of the Whigs. George the Third seized it in 
his turn as the base of the power he purposed to give to the Crown. 
The royal revenue was employed to buy seats and to buy votes. Day 
by day, George himself scrutinized the voting-list of the two Houses, 
and distributed rewards and punishments as members voted according \ 
to his will or no. Promotion in the civil service, preferment in the 
Church, rank in the army was reserved for ^' the King's friends." 
Pensions and court places were used to influence debates. Bribery 
was employed on a scale never known before. Under Bute's ministry 
an office was opened at the Treasury for the bribery of members, 
and twenty-five thousand pounds are said to have been spent in a 
single day. 

The result of these measures was seen in the tone of the very 
Parliament which had till now bowed beneath the greatness of Pitt. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND: 



745 



In the leeth of his denunciations the Peace was approved by a 
majority of five to one. "Now indeed my son is king !" cried the 
Princess Dowager. But the victory was far from being won yet. So 
long as the sentiment of the House of Commons had fairly represented 
that of the nation at large, England had cared little for its abuses or 
its corruption. But the defeat of the Great Commoner disclosed the 
existence of a danger of which it had never dreamed. The country 
found itself powerless in the face of a body Avhich wielded the supreme 
authority in its name, but which had utterly ceased to be its repre- 
sentative. It looked on helplessly while the King, by sheer dint of 
corruption, turned the House which was the guardian of public rights 
into a means of governing at his will. Parliament was the con- 
stitutional expression of public opinion, and now public opinion was 
without the means of uttering itself in Parliament. The natural result 
followed. The early years of George the Third were distinguished by a 
pubhc discontent, by political agitation and disturbances, such as have 
never been known since. Bute found himself the object of a detesta- 
tion so sudden and so universal in its outbreak as to force him to 
resign in 1763. The King, as frightened as his minister, saw that the 
time had not yet come for ruling by his own adherents alone, and 
appealed for aid to Pitt, But though he had been betrayed by 
Newcastle and his followers, Pitt saw clearly that without the sup- 
port of the whole Whig party a minister would be, as Bute had 
been, a tool of the Crown ; and he made the return of all its sections 
to office a condition of his ov/n. George refused to comply with 
terms which would have defeated his designs ; and he w^as able to save 
himself from submission by skilfully using the division which was 
rending the Whig camp into two opposite forces. The bulk of it, 
with Lord Rockingham and the Cavendishes at its head, leant to Pitt 
and to the sympathy of the commercial classes. A smaller part, under 
George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford, retained the narrow and 
selfish temper of a mere oligarchy, in whom greed of power over- 
mastered eveiy other feeling. In an evil hour George threw himself 
on the support of the last. 

Of what moment his choice had been he was soon to learn. 
With Grenville's ministiy began the pohtical power of the Press and the 
struggle with America. The opinion of the country no sooner found 
itself unrepresented in Parliament than it sought an outlet in the 
Press. We have already noted the early history of English journahsm, 
its rise under the ^ Commonwealth, the censorship which fettered it, 
and the removal of this censorship after the Revolution. Under the 
two first Georges, its progress was hindered by the absence of great 
topics for discussion, the worthlessness of its writers, and above all the 
political lethargy of the time. It was in fact not till the accession 
of George the Third that the impulse which Pitt had given to the 



746 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



national spirit and the rise of a keener interest in politics raised the 
Press inta a political power. The new force of public opinion found 
in it a court of political appeal from the House of Commons. The 
journals became mouthpieces for that outburst of popular hatred which 
drove Lord Bute from office in the teeth of his unbroken majority. 
The North Briton^ a journal written by John Wilkes, denounced the 
Peace with peculiar bitterness, and ventured for the first time to attack 
a minister by name. Wilkes was a worthless profligate, but he had 
a remarkable power of enlisting popular sympathy on his side, and by a 
singular irony of fortune he became the chief instrument in bringing 
about three of the greatest advances which our constitution has ever 
made. At a later time he woke the nation to a conviction of the need 
for Parliamentary reform by his defence of the rights of constituencies 
against the despotism of the House of Commons, and took the lead 
in the struggle which put an end to the secrecy of Parliamentary 
proceedings. The prosecution of his North Briton in 1764 first 
established the right of the Press to discuss public affairs. Wilkes 
was sent to prison on a " general warrant ^' from the Secretary of State. 
The legality of such a mode of arbitrary arrest by an officer of state, 
on a warrant which did not name the person to be arrested and which 
was not issued by a magistrate, was at once questioned, and no such 
warrant has ever been issued since. A writ of habeas corpus freed 
Wilkes from prison, but he was soon prosecuted for libel, and the 
House of Commons condemned the paper, which was still before the 
civil courts, as a " false, scandalous, and seditious libel." The House of 
Lords at the same time voted a pamphlet found among Wilkes's papers 
to be blasphemous, and advised a prosecution. Wilkes fled to France, 
and was soon expelled from the House of Commons. . But the 
assumption of an arbitrary judicial power by both Houses, and 
the system of terror which Grenville put in force against the Press 
by issuing two hundred injunctions against different journals, roused a 
storm of indignation throughout the country. Every street resounded 
with cries of " Wilkes and Liberty." Bold as he was, Grenville dared 
go no further ; and six years later, the failure of the prosecution 
directed against an anonymous journalist named "Junius" for his Letter 
to the King established the right of the Press to criticize the conduct 
not of ministers or Parliament only, but of the sovereign himself. 

The same recklessness which was shown by Grenville in his struggle 
with the Press was shown in his struggle with the American colonies. 
Pitt had waged war with characteristic profusion and defrayed its 
expenses by enormous loans. The public debt now stood at a hundred 
and forty millions, and the first work of the Grenville Ministry was 
to make provision for the new burthens the nation had incurred. 
As the burthen had been partly incurred in the defence of the 
American colonies, Grenville resolved that the colonies should bear 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



747 



their share of it. He raised the import duties at colonial ports. To deal 
with external commerce was generally held to be an unquestioned 
right of the mother country : and irritated as they were by these 
changes, the colonists submitted to them. A far heavier blow was 
dealt at their commerce by the rigid enforcement of the laws which 
restricted colonial trade to British ports, and the suppression of the 
illicit trade which had grown up with the Spanish settlements. The 
measure was a harsh and unwise one, but it was legal, and could only 
be resented by a general pledge to use no British manufactures. But 
the next scheme of the Minister, his proposal to introduce internal 
taxation within the bounds of the colony itself by reviving the scheme 
of an excise or stamp duty which Walpole's good sense had rejected, 
was met in another spirit. Taxation and representation, the colo- 
nists held, went hand in hand. America had no representatives in 
the British Parliament. The representatives of the colonists met 
in their own colonial Assemblies, and these were willing to grant sup- 
plies of a yet larger amount than a stamp-tax would produce. With 
this protest and offer they despatched Benjamin Franklin, who had 
risen from his position of a working printer in Philadelphia to high 
repute among scientific discoverers, as their agent to England. But 
his remonstrances only kindled Grenville's obstinacy, and the Stamp 
Act was passed in 1765. Franklin saw no other course for the colonies 
than submission, but submission was the last thing which the colonists 
dreamed of. The Northern and Southern States were drawn together 
by the new danger. The Assembly of Virginia was the first to 
formally deny the right of the British Parliament to meddle with in- 
ternal taxation, and to demand the repeal of the Act. Massachusetts 
not only adopted the denial and the demand as its own, but pro- 
posed a Congress of delegates from all the colonial Assemblies to 
provide for common and united action. In October 1765 this 
Congress met to repeat the protest and petition of Virginia. 

For the moment this unexpected danger seemed to raise English 
politics out of the chaos of faction and intrigue into which they were 
sinking. Not only had the Ministry incurred the hatred of the people, 
but the arrogance of Grenville had earned the resentment of the 
King. George again offered power to William Pitt. But Pitt stood 
almost alone. The silence of Newcastle and the Rockingham party 
while the war and his past policy was censured in Parliament had 
estranged him from the only section of the Whigs which could have 
acted with him : and the one friend who remained to him, his brother- 
in-law. Lord Temple, refused to aid in an attempt to construct a 
Cabinet. The King had no resource but to turn to the Marquis of 
Rockingham and the Whig party which he headed, but Rockingham 
had hardly taken office in July 1765 when the startling news came 
from America that Congress had resolved on resistance. Its reso- 



748 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap . 



lution had been followed by action. No sooner had the stamps 
for the new Excise arrived in Boston than they were seized and 
held in custody by the magistrates of the town. The neWs at once 
called Pitt to the front. As a Minister he had long since rejected a 
similar scheme for taxiing the colonies. He had been ill and absent 
from Parliament when the Stamp Act was passed, but he adopted 
to the full the constitutional claim of America. He gloried in the 
resistance which was denounced ill Parliament as rebellion. " In my 
opinion," he said, "this kingdom has no right to lay a tax oil the 
colonies. . . America is obstinate ! America is almost in open 
rebellion ! Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions 
of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to 
submit to be slaves would have been fit instruments to make slaves 
of the rest." His v/ords determined the action of the timid Ministry, 
and in spite of the resistance of the King and the " King's friends " the 
Stamp Act was formally repealed in 1766. But the doctrine he had 
laid down was as formally repudiated by a Declaratory Act passed at 
the same time which asserted the supreme power of Parliament over the 
colonies " in all cases whatsoever." 

From this moment the Ministry was unable to stand against thoi 
general sense that the first man in the country should be its ruler. i 
Pitt's aim was still to unite the Whig party, and though forsaken by 
Lord Temple, he succeeded to a great extent in the administration 
which he formtd in the summer of 1766. Rockingham indeed re-' 
fused office, but the bulk of his fellow Ministers remained, and they 
v/ere reinforced by the few friends who clung to Pitt. In his zeal to * 
bring all parties together, even some of the Court party were admitted 
to minor offices in the aditiinistration, a step which won the warm 
approbation of the King as likely to destroy " all party distinctions." 
Never had the hopes of a wise and noble government been stronger,, 
and never were they fated to be more signally foiled. The life of the ' 
Ministry lay in Pitt, in his immense popularity, and in the command 
which his eloquence gave him over the House of Commons. His , 
acceptance of the Earldom, of Chatham removed him to the House ' 
of Lords, and for a while ruined the confidence which his reputation ♦ 
for unselfishness had aided him to win. But it was fronl no vulgar • 
ambition that Pitt laid down his title of the Great Commoner. It r 
was the consciousness of failing strength which made him dread the | 
storms of debate, and in a few months the dread became a certainty. 
A painful and overwhelming ilJuess, the result of nervous disorganiza- 
tion, withdrew him from public afi'airs ; and his withdrawal robbed his 
colleagues of aU vigour or union. The plans which Chatham had set 
on foot for the better government of Ireland, the transfer of India 
from the Company to the Crown, and the formation of a Northern 
Alliance with Prussia and Russia to balance the Family Compact of 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



749 



the House of Bourbon, were suffered to drop. The one aim of the 
Ministry was to exist. It sought strength by the readmission of 
George Grenville and the Bedford party to office, but this practical 
abandonment of the policy of Pitt was soon followed by the re4:ire- 
ment of his friends and of the chief of the Rockingham Whigs. 
A series of changes which it is needless to recount in detail left it 
practically a joint Ministry of the worst faction of the Whigs and of 
the new party which, had been slowly gathering strength under the 
name of the King's friends. In spite however of the worthlessness 
and mediocrity of its members, this Ministry lasted under the suc- 
cessive guidance of the Duke of Grafton and Lord North for nearly 
eight years, from 1768 to the close of the American war. 

Its strength lay in the disorganization of the Whig party and the 
steady support of the King. George the Third had at last reached 
his aim. Pitt v/as discredited and removed for a time from the stage. 
The Whigs under Rockingham were fatally divided both from him and 
from the Bedford party. If the Bedfords were again in office it was on 
the condition of doing the King's will. Their Parliamentary support 
lay in the Tories and the " King's friends," who looked for direction to 
George himself. In the early days of the Ministry his influence was 
felt to be predominant. In its later and more disastrous days it was 
supreme, for Lord North, who became the head of the Ministry on 
Grafton's retirement in 1770, was the mere mouthpiece of the King. 
"Not only did he direct the Minister," a careful observer tells 
us, " in all important matters of foreign and domestic policy, but 
he instructed him as to the management of debates in Parliament, 
suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how measures 
should be carried. He reserved for himself all the patronage, he 
arranged the whole cast of the administration, settled the relative 
place and pretensions of ministers of state, lav; officers, and members 
of the household, nominated and promoted the English and Scotch 
judges, appointed and translated bishops and deans, and dispensed 
other preferments in the Church. He disposed of military govern- 
ments, regiments, and commissions, and himself ordered the marching 
of troops. He gave and refused titles, honours, and pensions." All- 
this immense patronage was steadily used for the creation and main- 
tenance of a party in both Houses of Parliament attached to the 
King himself; and its weight was seen in the dependence to which 
the new Ministry was reduced. George was in fact sole Minister 
during the eight years which followed ; and the shame of the darkest 
hour of English history lies wholly at his door. 

Again, as in 1763, the Government which he directed plunged at his 
instigation into a struggle with opinion at home and with the colonists 
of America. The attempt of the House of Commons to gag the Press 
and to transform itself into a supreme court of justice had been prac- 



750 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Sec. II. I tically foiled. It now began the most daring attack ever made, by a 
body professing to be representative, on the rights of those whom 
it represented. In 1768 Wilkes returned from France and was 
elected member for Middlesex, a county the large number of whose 
voters made its choice a real expression of public opinion. The choice 
of Wilkes was in effect a public condemnation of the House of Com- 
mons. The Ministry shrank from a fresh struggle with the agitator, 
but the King was eager for the contest. " I think it highly expedient 
to apprise you,'' he wrote to Lord North, " that the expulsion of Mr, 
Wilkes appears to be very essential, and must be effected." The 
Ministers and the House of Commons bowed to his will. By his non- 
appearance in court when charged with libel Wilkes had become an 
outlaw, and he was now thrown into prison on his outlawry. Dangerous 
riots broke out in London and over the whole country ; but the Govern- 
ment persevered. In 1769 the House of Commons expelled Wilkes 1 
as a libeller. He was at once re-elected by the shire of Middlesex.! 
Violent and oppressive as the course of the House of Commons had I 
been, it had as yet acted within its strict right, for no one questioned* 
its possession of a right of expulsion. But the defiance of Middlesex led 
it now to go further. It resolved, " That Mr. Wilkes having been in 
this session of Parliament expelled the House, was and is incapable 
of being elected a member to serve in the present Parliament ; " and 
it issued a writ for a fresh election. Middlesex answered this insolent 
claim to hmit the free choice of a constituency by again returning 
Wilkes ; and the House was driven by its anger to a fresh and more 
j outrageous usurpation. It again expelled the member for Middlesex, 
: and on his return for the third time by an immense majority, it voted 
that the candidate whom he had defeated. Colonel Luttrell, ought to have 
been returned, and was the legal representative of Middlesex. The 
Commons had not only limited at their own arbitrary discretion the free 
election of the constituency, but they had transferred its rights to 
themselves by seating Luttrell as member in defiance of the deliberate 
choice of Wilkes by the freeholders of Middlesex. The country at 
once rose indignantly against this violation of constitutional law. 
Wilkes was elected an Alderman of London ; and the Mayor, Alder- 
men, and Livery petitioned the King to dissolve the Parhament. A 
remonstrance from London and Westminster said boldly that " there 
is a time when it is clearly demonstrable that men cease to be repre- 
sentatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Commons do 
not represent the people." Junius, an anonymous writer, attacked the 
Government in letters, which, rancorous and unscrupulous as was their 
tone, gave a new power to the literature of the Press by their clearness 
and terseness of statement, the finish of their style, and the terrible 
vigour of their invective. 

The storm, however, beat idly on the obstinacy of the King. Junius 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



75 r 



was prosecuted, and the petitions and remonstrances of London 
haughtily rejected. At the beginning of 1770 however a cessation of the 
disease which had long held him prostrate enabled Chatham to re- 
appear in the House of Lords. He at once denounced the usurpations 
of the Commons, and brought in a bill to declare them illegal. But 
his genius made him the first to see that remedies of this sort were 
inadequate to meet evils which really sprang from the fact that the 
House of Commons no longer represented the people of England. He 
brought forward a plan for its reform by an increase of the county 
members. Further he could not go, for even in the proposals he made 
ae stood almost alone. Even the Whigs under Lord Rockingham 
had no sympathy with Parliamentary reform. They shrank with 
haughty disdain from the popular agitation in which public opinion 
was forced to express itself, and which Chatham, while censuring its 
extravagance, deliberately encouraged. It is from the quarrels be- 
tween Wilkes and the House of Commons that we may date the in- 
fluence of public meetings on English politics. The gatherings of the 
Middlesex electors in his support were preludes to the great meetings 
of Yorkshire freeholders in which the question of Parliamentary re- 
form rose into importance ; and it was in the movement for reform, 
and the establishment of corresponding committees throughout the 
country for the purpose of promoting it, that the power of political 
agitation first made itself felt. Political societies and clubs took their 
part in the creation and organization of public opinion : and the spread 
of discussion, as well as the influence which now began to be exercised 
by the appearance of vast numbers of men in support of any political 
movement, proved that Parliament would soon have to reckon with 
the sentiments of the people at large. 

But an agent far more effective than popular agitation was preparing, 
to bring the force of public opinion to bear on Parliament itself. We 
have seen how much of the corruption of the House of Commons sprang 
from the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, but the secrecy was the 
harder to preserve as the nation woke to a greater interest in its own 
aflairs. From the accession of the Georges imperfect reports of the 
more important discussions began to be published under the title of 
" The Senate of Lilliput,'' and with feigned names or simple initials to 
denote the speaker. Obtained by stealth and often merely recalled by 
memory, these reports were naturally inaccurate ; and their inaccuracy 
was eagerly seized on as a pretext for enforcing the rules which guarded 
the secrecy of proceedings in Parhament. In 1771 the Commons issued a 
proclamation forbidding the publication of debates ; and six printers, 
who set it at defiance, were summoned to the bar of the House. One 
who refused to appear was arrested by its messenger ; but the arrest 
at once brought the House into conflict with the magistrates of Lon- 
don. They set aside the proclamation as without legal force, released 



7S2 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEQPLp, 



[Chap. 



the printers, and sent the messenger to prison for an unlawful arrest. 
The House sent the Lord Mayor to the Tower, but the cheers of the 
crowds which followed him on his way told that public opinion was 
again with the Press, and the attempt to hinder its pubhcation of Parlia- 
mentary proceedings dropped silently on his release at the next proro- 
gation. P'ew changes of equal importance have been so quietly brought 
about. Not only was the responsibility of members to their consti- 
tuents made constant and effective by the publication of their pro- 
ceedings, but the nation itself was called in to assist in the deliberations 
of its representatives. A new and wider interest in its own affairs was 
roused in the people at large^ and a new political education was given 
to it through the discussion of every subject of national importance 
in the Houses and the Press. Public opinion, as gathered up and 
represented on all its sides by the journals of the day, became a force in 
practical statesmanship, influenced the course of debates, and controlled 
in a closer and more constant way than even Parliament itself had 
been able to do the actions of the Government. The importance of 
its new position gave a weight to the Press which it had never had 
before. The first great Enghsh journals date from this time. With 
the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post^ the Moi^ning Herald^ and 
the Tinies^ all of which appeared in the interval between the opening 
years of the American War and the beginning of the war with the 
French Revolution, journalism took a new tone of responsibihty and 
intelligence. The hacks of Grub Street were superseded by publicists 
of a high moral temper and literary excellence ; and philosophers like 
Coleridge or statesmen like Canning turned to influence public opinion 
through the columns of the Press. 

But as yet these influences were feebly felt, and George the Third 
was able to set Chatham^s protests disdainfully aside, and to plunge 
into a contest far more disastrous for the fortunes of England. In all 
the wretched chaos of the last few years, what had galled him most had 
been the one noble act which averted a war between England andj 
her colonies. To the King the Americans were already "rebels,'^ and the j 
great statesman whose eloquence had made their claims irresistible! 
was a " trumpet of sedition." George deplored, in his correspondence J 
with Lord North, the repeal of the Stamp Act. "All men feeV^ he 
wrote, "that the fatal compliance in 1766 has increased the pretensions., 
of the Americans to absolute independence.'' In America itself the| 
news of the repeal had been received with universal joy, and taken as 
a close of the strife. But on both sides there remained a pride and 
irritability which only wise handling could have allayed ; and in the 1 
present state of Enghsh politics wise handling was impossible. NoJ 
sooner had the illness of Lord Chatham removed him from any real - 
share in public affairs than the wretched administration which still ^ 
bore his name suspended the Assembly of New York on its refusal to| 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



753 



provide quarters for English troops, and resolved to assert British 
sovereignty by levying import duties of trivial amount at American 
ports. The Assembly of Massachusetts was dissolved on a trifling 
quarrel with its Governor, and Boston was occupied for a time by 
British soldiers. The remonstrances of the Legislatures of Massachu- 
setts and Virginia, however, coupled with a fall in the funds, warned 
the Ministers of the dangerous course on which they had entered; and 
in 1769 the troops were withdrawn, and all duties, save that on tea, 
abandoned. A series of petty quarrels went on in almost every colony 
between the popular Assemblies and the Governors appointed by the 
Crown, and the colonists persevered in their agreement to import no- 
thing from the mother country. But for three years there was no pro- 
spect of serious strife. In America the influence of George Washington 
allayed the irritation of Virginia. Massachusetts contented itself with 
quarrelhng with the Governor and refusing to buy tea so long as the duty 
was levied. In England, even Grenville, though approving the reten- 
tion of the duty in question, abandoned all dream of further taxation. 
But the King was supreme, and the fixed purpose of the King was to 
seize on the first opportunity of undoing the ^^fatal compliance of 1766." 
A trivial riot gave him the handle he wanted. He had insisted on 
the tea duty being retained when the rest were withdrawn, and in 
December 1773 the arrival of some English ships laden with tea kindled 
fresh irritation in Boston, where the non-importation agreement was 
strictly enforced. A mob in the disguise of Indians boarded the 
vessels and flung their contents into the sea. The outrage was 
deplored alike by the friends of America in England and by its own 
leading statesmen ; and both Washington and Chatham were prepared 
to support the Government in its looked-for demand of redress. But 
the thought of the King was not of redress but of repression, and 
he set roughly aside the more conciliatory proposals of Lord North 
and his fellow-ministers. They had already rejected as " frivolous and 
vexatious " a petition of the Assembly of Massachusetts for the dis- 
missal of two public officers whose letters home advised the withdrawal 
of free institutions from the colonies. They now seized on the riot 
as a pretext for rigorous measures. A bill introduced into Parlia- 
ment in the beginning of 1774 punished Boston by closing its port 
against all commerce. Another punished the State of Massachusetts 
by withdrawing the liberties it had enjoyed ever since the Pilgrim 
Fathers landed on its soil. Its charter v/as altered. The choice of 
its Council was transferred from the people to the Crown, and the 
nomination of its judges was transferred to the Governor. In the 
Governor, too, by a provision more outrageous than even these, was 
vested the right of sending all persons charged with a share in the 
late disturbances to England for trial. To enforce these measures of 
repression troops were sent to America, and Genera] Gage, the com- 

3 c 



754 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



mander-in-chief there, was appointed Governor of Massachusetts. The 
King^s exultation at the prospect before him was unbounded. " The 
die," he wrote triumphantly to his Minister, " is cast. The colonies 
must either triumph or submit." Four regiments would be enough to 
bring Americans to their senses. They would only be "lions while 
we are lambs." " If we take the resolute part," he decided solemnly, 
" they will undoubtedly be very meek." Unluckily, the blow at Massa- 
chusetts was received with anything but meekness. The jealousies 
between State and State were hushed by the sense that the liberties of 
all were in danger. If the British Parliament could cancel the charter 
of Massachusetts and ruin the trade of Boston, it could cancel . the 
charter of every colony and ruin the trade of every port from the St. 
Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, All, therefore, adopted the cause of 
Massachusetts ; and all their Legislatures, save that of Georgia, sent 
delegates to a Congress which assembled on the 4th of September at 
Philadelphia. Massachusetts took a yet bolder course. Not a citizen 
would act under the new laws. Its Assembly met in defiance of the 
Governor, called out the militia of the State, and provided arms and 
ammunition for it. But there was still room for reconciliation. The 
resolutions of the Congress had been moderate ; for Virginia was the 
wealthiest and most influential among the States who sent delegates ; 
and Virginia under Washington's guidance, though resolute to resist 
the new measures of the Government, still clung to the mother country. 
At home, the merchants of London and Bristol pleaded loudly for 
reconciliation; and in January 1775 Chatham again came forward to 
avert the strife he had once before succeeded in preventing. With 
characteristic grandeur of feeling he set aside all half-measures or pro- 
posals of compromise. "It is not cancelling a piece of parchment," 
he insisted, " that can win back America : you must respect her fears 
and her resentments." The bill which he introduced in concert with 
Franklin provided for the repeal of the late Acts and for the security 
of the colonial charters, abandoned the claim to taxation, and ordered 
the recall of the troops. A colonial Assembly was directed to assemble 
and provide means by which America might contribute towards the 
payment of the public debt. 

The contemptuous rejection of Chatham's measure began the great 
struggle which ended eight years later in the severance of the Ameri- 
can Colonies from the British Crown. The Congress of delegates 
from the Colonial Legislatures at once voted measures for general 
defence, ordered the levy of an army, and set George Washington at \ 
its head. No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's 
life. Washington was grave and courteous in address ; his manners 
were simple and unnretending ; his silence and the serene calmness of 
his temper spoke of a perfect self-mastery ; but there was little in his I 
outer bearing to reveal the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



755 



all the simple majesty of an aneient statue, out of the smaller passions, 
the meaner impulses of the world around him. What recommended 
'•im for command as yet was simply his weight among his fellow land- 
owners of Virginia, and the experience of war which he had gained by 
Lervice in Braddock's luckless expedition against Fort Duquesne. It was 
only as the weary fight went on that the colonists learnt little by little the 
greatness of their leader, his clear judgment, his heroic endurance, his 
iilence under difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat, 
rhe patience with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with 
vhich he struck, the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved 
irom its task through resentment or jealousy, that never through war 
vx peace felt the touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no aim save 
•hat of guarding the freedom of his fellow countrymen, and no personal 
longing save that of returning to his own fireside when their freedom 
was secured. It was almost unconsciously that men learnt to cling to 
Washington with a trust and faith such as few other men have won, 
and to regard him with a reverence which still hushes us in presence 
of his memory. Even America hardly recognized his real grandeur 
till death set its seal on '^ the man first in war, first in peace, and first 
in the hearts of his fellow countrymen." Washington, more than 
any of his fellow colonists, represented the clinging of the Virginian 
landowners to the mother country, and his acceptance of the command 
proved that even the most moderate among them had no hope now 
save in arms. The struggle opened with a skirmish between a party 
of English troops and a detachment of militia at Lexington, and in a 
few days twenty thousand colonists appeared before Boston. The 
Congress re-assembled, declared the States they represented "The 
Jnited Colonies of America," and undertook the work of government. 
Meanwhile ten thousand fresh troops landed at Boston ; but the pro- 
vincial militia seized the neck of ground which joins it to the mainland, 
and though they were driven from the heights of Bunkers Hill which 
commanded the town, it was only after a desperate struggle in which 
their bravery put an end for ever to the taunts of cowardice which 
had been levelled against the colonists. " Are the Yankees cowards ? " 
shouted the men of Massachusetts, as the first English attack rolled 
back baffled down the hill-side. But a far truer courage was shown 
in the stubborn endurance with which sixteen thousand raw militia- 
men, who gradually dwindled to ten, ill fed and ill armed, with but 
forty-five rounds of ammunition to each man, cooped up through the 
winter, under V/ashington's command, a force of ten thousand veterans 
in the lines of Boston till the spring of 1776 saw them withdraw from 
the city to New York, where the whole British army, largely rein- 
forced by mercenaries from Germany, was concentrated under General 
Howe. Meanwhile a raid of the American General Arnold nearly 

-drove the British troops from Canada ; and though his attempt 

I 3 C 2 



The Indr- 
pendench 



756 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Sec. II. 

The Inde- 
pendence 

OF 

America. 
1761- 
1785. 



Death of 
Ckatliaxn. 



\ 



broke down before Quebec, it showed that all hope of reconcihatio: 
was over. The colonies of the south, the last to join in the struggles 
expelled their Governors at the close of 1775. This decisive stq 
was followed by the great act with which American history begins, the 
adoption on the 4th of July, 1776, by the delegates in Congress of the 
Declaration of Independence. " We,'^ ran its solemn words, "the repre- 
sentatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our 
intentions, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies 
are, and of right ought to be. Free and Independent States.^' 

The triumph of the colonies was soon followed by suffering and 
defeat. Howe, an active general with a fine army at his back, cleared 
Long Island in August by a victory at Brooklyn ; and Washington, 
whose army was weakened by withdrawals and defeat, and disheart- 
ened by the loyal tone of the State in which it was encamped, was forced 
to evacuate New York and New Jersey, and to fall back, first on the 
Hudson and then on the Delaware. The Congress prepared to fly 
from Philadelphia, and a general despair showed itself in cries of peace. 
But a well-managed surprise at Trenton, and a dariD,g march on the 
rear of Howe's army at Princetown restored the spirits of Washington's 
men, and forced the English general in his turn to fall back on New 
York. The spring of 1 777 opened with a combined effort for the suppres- 
sion of the revolt. An army assembled in Canada under General Bur- 
goyne marched by way of the Lakes to seize the line of the Hudson, 
and with help from the army at New York to cut off New England from 
her sister provinces. Howe meanwhile sailed up the Chesapeake, and 
marched on Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States 
and the seat of the Congress. The rout of his little army of seven thou- 
sand men at Brandywine forced Washington to abandon Philadelphia, 
and after a bold but unsuccessful attack on his victors at Germanstown 
to retire into winter quarters on the banks of the Schuylkill. The 
unconquerable resolve with which he nerved his handful of beaten and 
half-starved troops in their camp at Valley Forge to face Howe's army 
through the winter is the noblest of Washington's triumphs. But in 
the north the war had taken another colour. When Burgoyne appeared 
on the Upper Hudson he found the road to Albany barred by an 
American force under General Gates. The spirit of New England, 
which had grown dull as the war rolled away from its borders, 
quickened again at the news of invasion and of the outrages com- 
mitted by the Indians whom Burgoyne employed among his troops. 
Its militia hurried from town and homestead to the camp ; and after 
a fruitless attack on the American lines, Burgoyne saw himself sur- 
rounded on the heights of Saratoga. On the 13th of October he 
was compelled to surrender. The news of this terrible calamity 
gave force to the words with which Chatham at the very time of thei 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



Ill 



surrender was pressing for peace. " You cannot conquer America," he 
cried when men were glorying in Howe's successes. *^ If I were an 
American as I am an Enghshman, while a foreign troop was landed 
in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never, never, 
never ! '^ Then, in a burst of indignant eloquence he thundered 
against the use of the Indian and his scalping-knife as allies of 
England against her children. , The proposals which Chatham brought 
forward might perhaps, in his hands, even yet have brought America 
and the mother country together. His plan was one of absolute concili- 
ation, and of a federal union between the settlements and Great Britain 
which would have left the colonies absolutely their own masters in all 
matters of internal government and linked only by ties of affection 
and loyalty to the general body of the Empire. But it met with 
the same fate as his previous proposals. Its rejection was at once fol- 
lowed by the news of Saratoga, and by the yet more fatal news that 
the disaster had roused the Bourbon Courts to avenge the humiliation 
of the Seven Years' War. In February 1778 France concluded an 
alliance with the States, and that of Spain followed after a year's 
delay. Even in the minds of the Ministers themselves all hope of 
conquering America had disappeared. The King indeed was as obsti- 
nate for war as ever ; and the country, stung by its great humiliation, 
sent fifteen thousand men to the ranks of the army. But even the King's 
influence broke down before the general despair. Lord North carried 
through Parliament bills which conceded to America all she had origi- 
nally claimed. The Duke of Richmond and a large number of the 
Whigs openly advocated the acknowledgment of American indepen- 
dence. If a hope still remained of retaining the friendship of the 
colonies and of baffling the efforts of France and Spain, it lay in Lord 
Chatham, and in spite of the King's resistance the voice of the whole 
country called him back to power. But on the eve of his return to 
office this last chance was shattered by the hand of death. The day 
for which George the Third only two years before had longed was 
come. Broken with age and disease, the Earl was borne to the House 
of Lords on the 7th of April, and uttered in a few broken words his 
protest against the proposal to surrender America. " His Majesty,'^ 
he murmured, " succeeded to an Empire as great in extent as its 
reputation was unsullied. Seventeen years ago this people was the 
terror of the world." Then falhng back in a swoon, he was borne 
home to die. 

From the hour of Chatham's death England entered on a conflict 
with enemies whose circle gradually widened till she stood single- 
handed against the world. In 1778, France and Spain were leagued 
with America against her. Their joint fleet of sixty ships rode the 
masters of the Channel, and threatened a descent on the English 
coast. But dead as Chatham was, his cry woke a new life in England.. 



Progresa 
of the 

War. 



758 



HISTORY aF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



rCHAP. 



" Shall we fall prostrate^" he exclaimed vdth his last breath, "before the 
House of Bourbon ? " and the divisions which had broken the nation 
in its struggle with American liberty vanished at a threat of French 
invasion. The weakness of the Ministry was compensated by the 
heroic energy of the nation itself. For three years, from 1779 to 
1782, General Elliot held against famine and bombardment the rock 
fortress of Gibraltar. Although a quarrel over the right of search 
banded Holland and the Courts of the North in an armed neutrality 
against her, and added the Dutch fleet to the number of her assailants, 
England held her own at sea. Even in America the fortune of the 
war seemed to turn. After Burgoyne's surrender the English gene- 
rals had withdrawn from Pennsylvania, and bent all their efforts on 
the south where a strong Royalist party srtill existed. The capture of 
Charleston and the successes of Lord Cornwallis in 1780 were ren- 
dered fruitless by the obstinate resistance of General Greene ; but 
the States were weakened by bankruptcy and unnerved by hopes of 
aid from France. Meanwhile the losses of England in the West 
were all but compensated by new triumphs in the East. 

Since the day of Plassey, India had been fast passing into the 
hands of the merchant company whose traders but a few years 
before held only three petty factories along its coast. The victory 
which laid Bengal at the feet of Clive had been followed in 1760 
by a victory at Wandewash, in which Colonel Coote's defeat of Lally, 
the French Governor of Pondicherry, established British supremacy 
over Southern India. The work of organization had soon to follow 
on that of conquest ; for the tyranny and corruption of the merchant- 
clerks who suddenly found themselves lifted into rulers was fast ruin- 
ing the province of Bengal ; and although Clive had profited more 
than any other by the spoils of his victory, he saw that the time had 
come when greed must give way to the responsibilities of power. In 
1765 he returned to India, and the two years of his rule were in fact 
the most glorious years in his life. In the teeth of opposition from every 
clerk and of mutiny throughout the army, he put down the private 
trading of the Company's servants and forbade their acceptance of 
gifts from the natives. Clive set an example of disinterestedness by 
handing over to public uses a legacy which had been left him by the 
prince he had raised to the throne of Bengal ; and returned poorer than 
he went to face the storm his acts had roused among those who were 
interested in Indian abuses at home. His unsparing denunciations of 
the misgovernment of Bengal at last stirred even Lord North to inter- 
fere ; and when the financial distress of the Company drove it for 
aid to Government, the grant of aid was coupled with measures of 
administrative reform. The Regulation Act of 1773 established aj 
Governor- General and a Supreme Court of Judicature for all British ' 
possessions in India, prohibited judges and members of Council from 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND i 



759 



trading, forbade any receipt of presents from natives, and ordered that 
every act of the Directors should be signified to the Government to be 
approved or disallowed. The new interest which had been aroused in 
the subject of India was seen in an investigation of the whole question 
of its administration by a Committee of the House of Commons. 
Clive's own early acts were examined with unsparing severity. His 
bitter complaint in the Lords that, Baron of Plassey as he was, he had 
been arraigned like a sheep-stealer, failed to prevent the passing of 
resolutions which censured the corruption and treachery of the early 
days of British rule in India. Here, however, the justice of the House 
stopped. When his accusers passed from the censure of Indian mis- 
government to the censure of Clive himself, the memory of his great 
deeds won from the House of Commons a unanimous vote, " That 
Robert Lord Clive did at the same time render great and meritorious 
services to his country.'^ 

By the Act of 1773 Warren Hastings was named Governor-General 
of the three presidencies. Hastings was sprung of a noble family 
which had long fallen into decay, and poverty had driven him in boy- 
hood to accept a writership in the Company's service. Clive, whose 
quick eye discerned his merits, drew him after Plassey into pohtical 
life ; and the administrative ability he showed, during the disturbed 
period which followed, raised him step by step to the post of Governor 
of Bengal. No man could have been better fitted to discharge the 
duties of the new office which the Government at home had created 
without a thought of its real greatness. Hastings was gifted with 
rare powers of organization and control. His first measure was to 
establish the direct rule of the Company over Bengal by abolishing 
the government of its native princes, which, though it had become 
nominal, hindered all plans for effective administration. The Nabob sank 
into a pensionary, and the Company's new province was roughly but 
efficiently organized. Out of the clerks and traders about him Hastings 
formed that body of public servants which still remains the noblest 
product of our rule in India. The system of law and finance which 
he devised, hasty and imperfect as it necessarily was, was far superior 
to any that India had ever seen. Corruption he put down with as 
firm a hand as Chve's, but he won the love of the new *^ civilians " as 
he won the love of the Hindoos. Although he raised the revenue of 
Bengal and was able to send home every year a surplus of half a million 
to the Company, he did this without laying a fresh burden on the 
natives or losing their good will. His government was guided by an 
intimate knowledge of and sympathy with the people. At a time when 
their tongue was looked on simply as a medium of trade and business, 
Hastings was skilled in the languages of India, he was versed in native 
customs, and familiar with native feeling. We can hardly wonder 
that his popularity with the Bengalees was such as no later ruler has 



70o 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



FChap. 



ever attained, or that after a century of great events Indian mothers 
still hush their infants with the name of Warren Hastings. 

With Hastings began the conscious and deliberate purpose of sub- 
jecting India to the British Crown. As yet, though English influence 
was great in the south, Bengal alone was directly in English hands. 
The policy of Warren Hastings looked forward to a time when 
England should be absolute mistress of the whole of Hindostan, from 
Ceylon to the Himalayas. For this he bound native princes, as in 
Oude or Berar, by treaties and subsidies, crushed without scruple every 
state which like that of the Rohillas seemed to afford a nucleus for 
resistance, and watched with incessant jealousy the growth of powers 
even as distant as the Sikhs. The American war surprised him in 
the midst of vast schemes which were to be carried out by later 
Governors, and hurried him into immediate action. The jealousy of 
France sought a counterpoise to the power of Britain in that of the 
Mahrattas, freebooters of Hindoo blood whose tribes had for a century 
past carried their raids over India from the hills of the western coast, 
and founded sovereignties in Guzerat, Malwa, and Tanjore. All were 
bound by a slight tie of subjection to the Mahratta chief who reigned 
at Poonah, and it was through this chieftain that the French envoys 
were able to set the whole confederacy in motion against the English 
presidencies. The danger was met by Hastings with characteristic 
swiftness of resolve. His difficulties were great. For two years he 
had been rendered powerless through the opposition of his Council ; 
and when freed from this obstacle the Company pressed him inces- 
santly for money, and the Crown more than once strove to recall him. 
His own general, Sir Eyre Coote, was miserly, capricious, and had to 
be humoured like a child. Censures and complaints reached him with 
every mail. But his calm self-command never failed. No trace of his 
embarrassments showed itself in his work. The war with the Mahrattas 
was pressed with a tenacity of purpose which the blunders of subor- 
dinates and the inefficiency of the soldiers he was forced to use never 
shook for a moment. Failure followed failure, and success had hardly 
been wrung from fortune when a new and overwhelming danger 
threatened from the south. A military adventurer, Hyder Ali, had 
built up a compact and vigorous empire out of the wreck of older 
principalities on the table-land of Mysore. Tyrant as he was, no 
native rule was so just as Hyder's, no statesmanship so vigorous. He 
was quickwitted enough to discern the real power of Britain, and only 
the wretched blundering of the Council of Madras forced him at last 
to the conclusion that war with the English was less dangerous than 
friendship with them. Old as he was, his generalship retained all its 
energy; and a discipHned army, covered by a cloud of horse and backed 
by a train of artillery, poured down in 1780 on the plain of the Carnatic. 
The small British force which met him was driven into Madras, and 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



761 



Madras itself was in danger. The news reached Hastings when he 
was at last on the verge of triumph over the Mahrattas ; but his triumph 
was instantly abandoned, a peace was patched up, and every soldier 
hurried to Madras. The appearance of Eyre Coote checked the pro- 
gress of Hyder, and in 1781 the victory of Porto Novo hurled him back 
into the fastnesses of Mysore. India was the one quarter of the world 
where Britain lost nothing during the American war ; and though the 
schemes of conquest which Hastings had formed were for the moment 
frustrated, the annexation of Benares, the extension of British dominions 
along the Ganges, the reduction of Oude to virtual dependence, the 
appearance of English armies in Central India, and the defeat of 
Hyder, laid the foundation of an Indian Empire which his genius 
was bold enough to foresee. 

But while England triumphed in the East, the face of the war in 
America was changed by a terrible disaster. Foiled in an attempt on 
North Carohna by the refusal of his fellow general, Sir H. Chnton, to 
assist him. Lord Cornwallis fell back in 1781 on Virginia, and en- 
trenched himself in the lines of York Town. A sudden march of 
Washington brought him to the front of the English troops at 
a moment when the French fleet held the sea, and the army of 
Cornwallis was driven by famine to a surrender as humiliating as 
that of Saratoga. The news fell like a thunderbolt on the wretched 
Minister who had till now suppressed at his master's order his own 
conviction of the uselessness of further bloodshed. Opening his 
arms and pacing wildly up and down his room. Lord North exclaimed 
^* It is all over,'' and resigned. England in fact seemed on the brink of 
ruin. Even Ireland turned on her. A force of Protestant Volunteers 
which had been raised for the defence of the island, and had rapidly 
grown to a hundred thousand men, demanded the repeal of Poyning's 
Act and the recognition of the Irish House of Lords as a final Court 
of Appeal. The demand was in effect a claim of Irish independence ; 
but there was no means of resisting it, for England was destitute of 
any force which she could oppose to the Volunteers. The hopes of her 
enemies rose high. Spain refused peace at any other price than the 
surrender of Gibraltar. France proposed that England should give 
up all her Indian conquests save Bengal. But at this moment the 
victories of Admiral Rodney, the greatest of English seamen save 
Nelson and Blake, saved the country from a dishonourable peace. 
He encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and only four 
of its vessels escaped to Cadiz. The triumphs of the French Admiral 
De Grasse called him to the Yfest Indies, and on the 12th April, 
1782, a manoeuvre which he was the first to introduce broke his 
opponent's line and drove the French fleet, shattered, from the sea. 
The final repulse of the allied armament before Gibraltar in September 
ended the war. In November the Treaties of Paris and Versailles, 



762 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



while yielding nothing to France and only Minorca and Florida to 
Spain, acknowledged without reserve the Independence of America. 

Section III.— Tl&e Secotid Pitt. 1783—1789. 

[Authorities, — Mr. Massey's account of this period may be supplemented by 
Lord Stanhope's *'Life of Pitt," Macknight's **Life of Burke,*' Lord Russell's 
** Memoirs of Fox,*' and the Correspondence of Lord Malmesbury, Lord 
Auckland, and Mr. Ros«. For the Slave Trade, see the Memoirs of Wilber- 
force by his sons. Burke may be studied in his Life by Macknight, in Mr. 
Morley's valuable essay on him, and above all in his own works. The state of 
foreign affairs in 1789 is best seen in Von Sybel's ** History of the French 
Revolution. "] 

The larger and world-wide issues of the establishment of American 
Independence lie beyond the scope of the present work, nor can we 
dwell here on the political and social influence which America has 
exercised ever since on the mother country itself. What startled men 
most at the time was the discovery that England was not ruined by the 
loss of her colonies or by the completeness of her defeat. She rose 
from it indeed stronger and greater than ever. The next ten years saw a 
display of industrial activity siich as the world had never witnessed before. 
Duting the twenty which followed she wrestled almost single-handed 
against the energy of the French Revolution, as well as against the 
colossal force of Napoleonic tyranny, and came out of the one struggle 
uncdnquered and out of the other a conqueror. Never had England 
stood higher among the nations of the old world than after Waterloo ; 
but she Was already conscious that h€r real greatness lay not in the 
old world but in the new. From the moment of the Declaration of 
Independence it mattered little whether England coilnted for less 
or more v^ith the nations around her. She was no longer a mere 
European power, no longer a mere rival of Germany or Russia or 
France. She was from that hour a mother of nations. In America 
she had begotten a great people, and her emigrant ships were still to 
carry on the movement of the Teutonic race from which she herself 
had sprung. Her work was to be colonization. Her settlers were to 
dispute Africa with the Kaffir and the Hottentot, to wrest New Zealand 
from the Maori, to sow on the shores of Australia the seeds of great 
nations. And to these nations she was to give not only her blood 
and her speech, but the freedom which she had won. It is the thought 
of this which flings its grandeur round the pettiest details of our 
story in the past. The history of France has little result beyond 
France itself. German or Italian history has no direct issue outside 
the bounds of Germany or Italy. But England is only a. small part of 
the outcome of English histoiy. Its greater issues lie not within the 
narrow limits of the mother island, but in the destinies of nations yet 
to be. The struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her statesmen. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



763 



the steady love of liberty and law in her people at large, were shaping 
in the past of our little island the future of mankind. 

At the time, however, when this work first became visible in the sever- 
ance of America, the wisdom of English statesmen seemed at its 
lowest ebb. The fall of Lord North in March 1782 recalled the 
Whigs to office ; and though the Tories had now grown to a compact 
body of a hundred and fifty members, the Whigs still remained 
superior to their rivals in numbers and ability as in distinctness of 
poHtical aim. The return, too, of the Bedford section of their party, 
as well as its steady opposition to the American war, had restored much 
of its early cohesion. But the return of this aristocratic and factious 
section only widened the breach which was slowly opening, on ques- 
tions such as that of Parliamentary reform, between the bulk of the 
Whig party and the small fragment which remained true to the more 
popular sympathies of Lord Chatham, Lord Shelburne was owned 
as the head of the Chatham party, and it was reinforced at this 
moment by the entry into Parliament of the second son of its earliest 
leader. William Pitt had hardly reached his twenty-second year ; 
but he left college with the learning of a ripe scholar, and his 
ready and sonorous eloquence had been matured by the teaching of 
Chatham. " He will be one of the first men in Parliament," said a 
member to the Whig leader, Charles Fox, after Pitt's first speech in 
the House of Commons. '' He is so already," replied Fox. His 
figure, tall and spare, but without grace, showed even now in every 
movement the pride which was written on the hard lines of a 
countenance never lighted by a smile, a pride which broke out in 
his cold and repulsive address, his invariable gravity of demeanour, 
and his habitual air of command. How great the qualities were 
which lay beneath this haughty exterior no one knew ; nor had any 
one guessed how soon this " boy," as his rivals m.ockingly styled him, 
was to crush every opponent and to hold England at his will. There 
was only a smile of wonder when he refused any of the minor offices 
which were offered him in the new Whig Administration, which in 
spite of the King's reluctance was formed on the fall of Lord North 
under the Marquis of Rockingham. 

On Rockingham fell the duty of putting an end at any cost to the 
war. Ireland was satisfied by the repeal of the Act of George the 
First which declared the right of the Parliament of Great Britain to 
legislate for the Irish people ; and negotiations were begun with 
America and its allies. But more important even than the work of 
peace was that of putting an end to those abuses in the composition 
of Parliament by which George the Third had been enabled to plunge 
the country into war. A thorough reform of the House of Commons 
was the only effectual means of doing this, and Pitt brought forward a 
bill founded on his father's plans for that purpose. But the Whigs 



764 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Ckap. 



could not resolve on the sacrifice of property and influence which such 
a reform woulaiirvolve. Pitt's bill was thrown out ; and in its stead the 
Ministry endeavoured to weaken the means of corrupt influence which 
the King had so unscrupulously used by disqualifying persons holding 
government contracts from sitting in Parliament, by depriving revenue 
officers of the elective franchise (a measure which diminished the 
influence of the Crown in seventy boroughs), and above all by a bill 
for the reduction of the civil establishment, of the pension list, and 
of the secret service fund, which was introduced by Burke. These 
measures were to a great extent effectual in diminishing the influence 
of the Crown over Parliament, and they are memorable as marking 
the date when the direct bribery of members absolutely ceased. 
They were absolutely inoperative in rendermg the House of Commons 
really representative of or responsible to the people of England. 
But the jealousy which the mass of the Whigs entertained for the 
Chatham section and its plans was more plainly shown on the death 
of Lord Rockingham in July. Shelburne was no sooner called to the 
head of the Ministry than Fox with his immediate followers resigned. 
Pitt on the other hand accepted office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
The Shelburne Ministry only lasted long enough to conclude the 
Peace of Paris ; for in the opening of 1783 it was overthrown by the 
most unscrupulous coalition known in our history, that of the Whig 
followers of Fox with the Tories who still clung to Lord North. 
Secure in their Parliamentary majority, and heedless of the power 
of public opinion without the walls of the House of Commons, the 
new Ministers entered boldly on a greater task than had as yet 
taxed the constructive genius of English statesmen. To leave such 
a dominion as Warren Hastings had built up in India to the control 
of a mere company of traders was clearly impossible ; and Fox pro- 
posed to transfer the political government from the Directors of the 
Company to a board of seven Commissioners, The appointment 
of the seven was vested in the first instance in Parliament, and 
afterwards in the Crown ; their office was to be held for five 
years, but they were removable on address from either House 
of Parliament. The proposal was at once met with a storm of op- 
position. The scheme was an injudicious one ; for the new Com- 
missioners would have been destitute of that practical knowledge of 
India which belonged to the Company, while the want of any imme- 
diate link between them and the actual Ministry of the Crown would 
have prevented Parliament from exercising a real control over their 
acts. But these objections to the India Bill were hardly heard in the 
popular outcry against it. The merchant-class was galled by the blow 
levelled at the greatest merchant-body in the realm : corporations 
trembled at the canceUing of a charter ; tne King viewed the measure 
as a mere means of transferring the patronage of India to the Whigs. 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



765 



With the nation at large the real fault of the bill lay in the character 
of the Ministry which proposed it. The Whigs had a second time 
rejected Pitt's proposal of Parhamentary reform ; but their coalition 
with North showed that in an unreformed Parliament the force 
of public opinion was unable to check the most shameless efforts of 
political faction. The power of the Crown had been diminished by 
the reforms of Lord Rockingham to the profit, not of the people, but 
of the borough-mongers who usurped its representation. To give 
the rule and patronage of India over to the existing House of Com- 
mons was to give a new and immense power to a body which misused 
in the grossest way the power it possessed. It was the sense of this 
popular feeling which encouraged the King to exert his personal in- 
fluence to defeat the measure in the Lords, and on its defeat to order 
his Ministers to deliver up the seals. In December 1783 Pitt 
accepted the post of First Lord of the Treasury ; but his position 
would at once have been untenable had the country gone with its 
nominal representatives. He was defeated again and again by 
large majorities in the Commons ; but the majorities dwindled as a 
shower of addresses from every quarter, from the Tory University of 
Oxford as from the Whig Corporation of London, proved that public 
opinion went with the Minister and not with the House. It was 
the general sense of this which justified Pitt in the firmness with 
which, in the teeth of addresses for his removal from office, he delayed 
the dissolution of Parliament for five months, and gained time for that 
ripening of opinion on which he counted for success. W^hen the elections 
of 1784 came the struggle was at once at an end. The public feel- 
ing had become strong enough for the moment to break through the 
corrupt influences which generally made representation a farce. Every 
great constituency returned supporters to Pitt ; of the majority which 
had defeated him in the Commons a hundred and sixty members 
were unseated ; and only a fragment of the Whig party was saved 
by its command of nomination boroughs. 

India owes to Pitt's triumph a form of government which remained 
unchanged to our own day. The India Bill which he introduced in 17*84 
preserved in appearance the political and commercial powers of the 
Directors, while establishing a Board of Control, formed from members 
of the Privy Council, for the approval or annulling of their acts. 
Practically, however, the powers of the Board of Directors were ab- 
sorbed by a secret committee of three elected members of that body, to 
whom all the more important administrative functions had been reserved 
by the bill, while those of the Board of Control were virtually exer- 
cised by its President. As the President was in effect a new Secretary 
of State for the Indian Department, and became an important member 
of each Ministry, responsible like his fellow-members for his action to 
Parliament, the administration of India was thus made a part of the 



766 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



general system of the English Government ; while the secret committee 
supplied the practical experience of Indian affairs in which the Minister 
might be deficient. But a far more important change than any which 
could be wrought by legislative measures took place at this time in 
the attitude of England itself towards its great dependency. The 
discussions over the rival India Bills created a sense of national 
responsibility for its good government. There was a general resolve 
that the security against injustice and misrule which was enjoyed 
by the poorest Englishman should be enjoyed by the poorest Hindoo ; 
and this resolve expressed itself in 1786 in the trial of Warren 
Hastings. Hastings returned from India at the close of the war with 
the hope of rewards as great as those of Clive* He had saved all 
that CHve had gained. He had laid the foundation of a vast empire 
in the East. He had shown rare powers of administration, and the 
foresight, courage, and temperance which mark the real rulers of men. 
But the wi-sdom and glory of his rule could not hide its terrible ruth- 
lessness. To glut the ceaseless demands of the Company at home, to 
support his wa.rs, to feed his diplomacy, he had needed money ; and he 
took it wherever he could find it. He sold for a vast sum the services 
of British troops to crush the free tribes of the Rohillas. He 
wrung half a million by oppression from the Rajah of Benares. He 
extorted by torture and starvation more than a million from the 
Princesses of Oude. Nor was this all. He had retained his hold 
upon power by measures hardly less unscrupulous. At the open- 
ing of his career, when he was looked upon as helpless before his 
enemies in the Council^ he had shown his power by using the forms of 
English law to bring Nuncomar, a native who chose the party opposed 
to him, to death as a forger. When Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief 
Justice of Bengal, stood in the way of his plans, he bribed him mto 
acquiescence by creating a fictitious and well-paid office in his favour. 
It was true that the hands of the Governor- General were clean, and 
that he had sought for power from no selfish motive, but from a well- 
grounded conviction that his possession of power was necessary for the 
preservation of India to the British Crown. But even Pitt shrank 
from justifying his acts when Burke, in words of passionate eloquence, 
moved his impeachment. The great trial lingered on for years, and 
in the long run Hastings secured an acquittal. But the end at which 
the impeachment aimed had really been won. The crimes which sullied 
the glory of Hastings have never been repeated by the worst of his 
successors. From that day to this the peasant of Bengal or of Mysore 
has enjoyed the same rights of justice and good government as are 
claimed by Englishmen. 

The refusal, in spite of pressure from the King, to shelter Hastings 
when he had once convinced himself that Hastings was unjust, marked 
the character of WilHam Pitt. At the moment when the new Parlia- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



767 



ment came together after the overthrow of the CoaHtion, the Minister of 
Uventy-five seemed master of England as no Minister had been before. 
Even the King yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for the 
triumph he had won for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of the 
madness which was soon to strike him down. The Whigs were broken, 
unpopular, and without a policy. The Tories clung to the Minister 
who had "saved the King." All that the trading classes had loved 
m Chatham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power, his 
patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the world within the 
-•arliament- House, they saw in William Pitt. He had little indeed of the 
ooetic and imaginative side of Chatham's genius, of his quick perception 
of" what was just and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions 
of national policy, his outlook into the future of the world. Pitt's flowing 
and sonorous commonplaces rang hollow beside the broken phrases 
which still make his father's eloquence a living thing to Englishmen. 
On the other hand he possessed some qualities in which Chatham was 
utterly wanting. His temper, though naturally ardent and sensitive, 
had been schooled in a proud self-command. His simplicity and 
good taste freed him from his father^s ostentation and extravagance. 
Diffuse and commonplace as his speeches seem, they were adapted as 
much by their very qualities of diffuseness and commonplace, as by their 
lucidity and good sense, to the intelligence of the middle classes whom 
Pitt felt to be his real audience. In his love of peace, his immense 
industry, his despatch of business, his skill in debate, his knowledge 
of finance, he recalled Sir Robert Walpole ; but he had virtues which 
Walpole never possessed, and he was free from Walpole's worst defects. 
He was careless of personal gain. He was too proud to rule by 
corruption. His lofty self-esteem left no room for any jealousy of 
subordinates. He was generous in his appreciation of youthful merits ; 
and the '' boys " he gathered round him, such as Canning and Lord 
Wellesley, rewarded his generosity l)y a devotion which death left 
untouched. With Walpole's cynical inaction Pitt had no sympathy 
whatever. His policy from the first was one of active reform, and he 
faced every one of the problems, financial, constitutional, religious, from 
which Walpole had shrunk. Above all he had none of Walpole's scorn 
of his feliow-men. The noblest feature in his mind was its wide 
humanity. His love for England was as deep and personal as his 
father's love, but of the sympathy with English passion and English 
prejudice which had been at once his father's weakness and strength he 
had not a trace. When Fox taunted him with forgetting Chatham's 
jealousy of France and his faith that she was the natural foe of England, 
Pitt answered nobly that " to suppose any nation can be unalterably 
the enemy of another is weak and childish." The temper of the time 
and the larger sympathy of man with man, which especially marks the 
eighteenth century as a turning-point in the history of the human race, 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



was everywhere bringing to the front a new order of statesmen, such 
as Turgot and Joseph the Second, whose characteristics were a love 
of mankind, and a behef that as the happiness of the individual can 
only be secured by the general happiness of the community to which 
he belongs, so the welfare of individual nations can only be secured 
by the general welfare of the world. Of these Pitt was one. But he 
rose high above the rest in the consummate knowledge and the practical 
force which he brought to the realization of his aims. 

Pitt's strength lay in finance ; and he came forward at a time when 
the growth of English wealth made a knowledge of finance essential 
to a great Minister. The progress of the nation itself was wonderful. 
Population more than doubled during the eighteenth century, and the 
advance of wealth was even greater than that of population. The 
war had added a hundred millions to the national debt, but the burden 
was hardly felt. The loss of America only increased the commerce 
with that country. Industry began that great career which was to 
make England the workshop of the world. During the first half of 
the century the cotton trade, of which Manchester was the principal 
seat, had only risen from the value of twenty to that of forty thousand 
pounds ; and the hand-loom retained the primitive shape which' is 
still found in the hand-looms of India, But three successive inventions 
in ten years, that of the spinning-machine in 1768 by the barber 
Arkwright, of the spinning-jenny in 1764 by the weaver Hargreaves, 
of the mule by the weaver Crompton in 1776, turned Lancashire into a 
hive of industry. At the accession of George the Third the whole hnen 
trade of Scotland was of less value than the cloth trade of Yorkshire. 
Before the close of his reign Glasgow was fast rising into one of the 
trading capitals of the world. The potteries which Wedgewood estab- 
lished in 1763, and in which he availed himself of the genius of Flax- 
man, soon eclipsed those of Holland or France. Before twenty years 
had passed more than twenty thousand potters were employed in 
Staffordshire alone. This rapid growth of manufactures brought 
about a corresponding improvement in the means of communication 
throughout the country. Up to this time these had been of the rudest 
sort. The roads were for the most part so wretched that all cheap or 
rapid transit was impossible ; and the cotton bales of Manchester 
were carried to Liverpool or Bristol on packhorses. One of the 
great works of this period was the covering England with a vast 
network of splendid highways. But roads alone could not meet the 
demands of the new commerce. The engineering genius of Brindley 
joined Manchester with its port of Liverpool in 176 1 by a canal which 
crossed the Irwell on a lofty aqueduct ; and the success of the 
experiment soon ied to the universal introduction of water-carriage. 
Canals linked the Trent with the Mersey, the Thames with the Trent, 
the Forth with the Clyde. The cheapness of the new mode of transit 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



769 



as well as the great advance in engineering science brought about a 
development of English collieries which soon gave coal a great place 
among our exports. Its value as a means of producing mechanical 
force was revealed in the discovery by which Watt in 1765 transformed 
the Steam Engine from a mere toy into the most wonderful instrument 
which human industry has ever had at its command. The same 
energy was seen in the agricultural change which passed gradually 
over the country. Between the first and the last years of the eighteenth 
century a fourth part of England was reclaimed from waste and 
brought under tillage. At the Revolution of 1688 more than half the 
kingdom was beheved to consist of moorland and forest and fen ; and 
vast commons and wastes covered the greater part of England north 
of the Humber. But the numerous enclosure bills which began with 
the reign of George the Second and especially marked that of his 
successor changed the whole face of the country. Ten thousand 
square miles of untilled land have been added under their operation 
to the area of cultivation ; while in the tilled land itself the production 
had been more than doubled by the advance of agriculture which 
began with the travels and treatises of Arthur Young, the introduction 
of the system of large farm.s by Mr. Coke of Norfolk, and the 
development of scientific tillage in the valleys of Lothian. 

If books are to be measured by the effect which they have produced 
on the fortunes of mankind, the " Wealth of Nations " must rank 
among the greatest of books. Its author was Adam Smith, an Oxford 
scholar and a professor at Glasgow. Labour, he contended, was the 
one source of wealth, and it was by freedom of labour, by suffering the 
worker to pursue his own interest in his own way, that the public wealth 
would best be promoted. Any attempt to force labour into artificial 
channels, to shape by laws the course of commerce, to promote special 
branches of industry in particular countries, or to fix the character of 
the intercourse between one country and another, is not only a wrong 
to the worker or the merchant, but actually hurtful to the wealth of a 
state. The book was published in 1776, in the opening of the American 
war, and studied by Pitt during his career as an undergratuate at 
Cambridge. From that time he owned Adam Smith for his master. 
He had hardly become Minister before he took the principles of 
the " Wealth of Nations " as the groundwork of his policy. The ten 
earlier years of his rule marked a new point of departure in Enghsh 
statesmanship. Pitt was the first English Minister who really grasped 
the part which industry, was to play in promoting the welfare of the 
world. He was not only a peace Minister and a financier, as Walpole 
had been, but a statesman who saw that the best security for peace lay 
in the freedom and widening of commercial intercourse between 
nations : that public economy not only lessened the general burdens 
but left additional capital in the hands of industry ; and that finance 

3 D 



770 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



might be turned from a mere means of raising revenue into a power- 
ful engine of political and social improvement. 

That little was done by Pitt himself to carry these principles into 
effect was partly owing to the mass of ignorance and prejudice with 
which he had to contend, and still more to the sudden break of 
his plans through the French Revolution. His power rested above 
all on the trading classes, and these were still persuaded that 
wealth meant gold and silver, and that commerce was best furthered 
by jealous monopolies. It was only by patience and dexterity that the 
mob of merchants and country squires who backed him in the House 
of Commons could be brought to acquiesce in the changes he proposed. 
How small his power was when it struggled with the prejudices around 
him was seen in the failure of the first great measure he brought for- 
ward. The question of parliamentary reform had been mooted, as we 
have seen, during the American war. Chatham had advocated an 
increase of county members, who were then the most independent patt 
of the Lower House. The Duke of Richmond talked of universal 
suffrage, equal electoral districts, and annual Parliaments. Wilkes 
anticipated the Reform Bill of a later time by proposing to dis- 
franchise the rotten boroughs, and to give .members in their stead to 
the counties and to the more popular and wealthy towns. William 
Pitt had made the question his own by bringing forward a motion for 
reform on his first entry into the House, and one of his first measures 
as Minister was to bring in a bill in 1785 which, while providing for the 
gradual extinction of all decayed boroughs, disfranchised thirty-six at 
once, and transferred their members to counties. He brought the 
King to abstain from opposition, and strove to buy off the borough- 
mongers, as the holders of rotten boroughs were called, by offering to 
compensate them for the seats they lost at their market-value. But 
the bulk of his own party joined the bulk of the Whigs in a steady 
resistance to the bill. The more glaring abuses, indeed, within Parlia- 
ment itself, the abuses which stirred Chatham and Wilkes to action, 
had in great part disappeared. The bribery of members had ceased. 
Burke's Bill of Economical Reform had dealt a fatal blow at the 
influence which the King exercised by suppressing a host of useless 
offices, household appointments, judicial and diplomatic charges, which 
were maintained for the purpose of corruption. Above all, the recent 
triumph of public opinion had done much to diminish the sense of 
any real danger from the opposition which Parliament had shown till 
now to the voice of the nation. " Terribly disappointed and beat " 
as Wilberforce tells us Pitt was by the rejection of his measure, the 
temper of the House and of the people was too plain to be mistaken, 
and though his opinion remained unaltered, he never brought it forward 
again. 

The failure of his constitutional reform was more than compensated 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



771 



by the triumphs of his finance. When he entered office pubHc credit 
was at its lowest ebb. The debt had been doubled by the American 
war, yet large sums still remained unfunded, while the revenue was 
reduced by a vast system of smuggling which turned every coast- 
town into a nest of robbers. The deficiency was met for the moment 
by new taxes, but the time which was thus gained served to change the 
whole face of public affairs. The first of Pitf s financial measures — his 
revival of the plan for gradually paying off the debt by a sinking fund 
which Walpole had thrown aside — was undoubtedly an error ; but it 
had a happy effect in restoring public confidence. He met the 
smuggler by a reduction of custom-duties which made his trade 
unprofitable. He revived Walpole's plan of an Excise. Meanwhile 
the public expenses were reduced, and commission after commission 
was appointed to introduce economy into every department of the 
public service. The rapid development of the national industry which 
we have already noted no doubt aided the success of these measures. 
Credit was restored. The smuggling trade was greatly reduced. In 
two years there was a surplus of a million, and though duty after duty 
was removed the revenue rose steadily with every remission of taxation. 
Meanwhile Pitt was showing the political value of the new finance. 
France was looked upon as England's natural enemy. Ireland, then 
as now, was England's difficulty. The tyrannous misgovernment 
under which she had groaned ever since the battle of the Boyne 
was producing its natural fruit ; the miserable land was torn with 
political faction, religious feuds and peasant conspiracies ; and so 
threatening had the attitude of the Protestant party which ruled it 
become during the American war that they had forced the English Par- 
liament to relinquish its control over their Parliament in Dublin. Pitt 
saw that much at least of the misery and disloyalty of Ireland sprang 
from its poverty. The population had grown rapidly while culture 
remained stationary and commerce perished. And of this poverty 
much was the direct result of unjust law. Ireland was a grazing 
country, but to protect the interest of English graziers the import of its 
cattle into England was forbidden. To protect the interests of Enghsh 
clothiers and weavers, its manufactures were loaded with duties. To 
redress this wrong was the first financial effort of Pitt, and the bill 
which he introduced in 1785 did away with every obstacle to freedom 
of trade between England and Ireland. It was a measure which, as he 
held, would " draw what remained of the shattered empire together," 
and repair in part the loss of America by creating a loyal and pros- 
perous Ireland ; and though he struggled almost alone in face of a 
fierce opposition from the Whigs and the Manchester merchants, he 
dragged it through the English Parliament, only to see it flung aside 
by the Protestant faction under Grattan which then ruled the ParHament 
of Ireland. But the defeat only spurred him to a greater effort else- 

3 D 2 



Sec. hi. 

The 
Second 

Pitt. 
1783- 
1789^ 

Pitt's 
Finance. 



772 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



where ; and his Treaty of Commerce with France in 1787 enabled 
the subjects of both countries to reside and travel in either without 
license or passport, did away with all prohibition of trade on either 
side, and reduced every import duty. But the spirit of humanity 
which breathed through these measures of commercial freedom soon 
took a larger scope. The trial of Warren Hastings was rousing 
England to a more vivid sym.pathy with the Hindoo ; and in the year 
which followed the adoption of free trade with France the new philan- 
thropy allied itself with the religious spirit created by the Wesleys in 
an attack on the Slave Trade. At the Peace of Utrecht the privilege 
of carrying negroes from the coast of Africa to sell them as labourers 
in the American colonies and the West Indian islands had been 
counted among the gains which England reaped from the war with 
Lewis ; but the horrors and iniquity of the trade, the ruin and degrada- 
tion of the native tribes which it brought about, and above all the oppres- 
sion of the negro himself, were now felt widely and deeply. " After a 
conversation in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood. 
just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston," Pitt encouraged 
his friend William Wilberforce, whose position as the Parliamentary 
representative of the Evangelical party gave weight to his advocacy of 
such a cause, to bring in a bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade. 
In spite of Pitt's ardent support, the bill of 1788 fell before the 
opposition of the Liverpool slave-merchants and the general indiffer- 
ence of the House. But the great movement of which it formed a 
part was now passing on the other side of the Channel into a revolution 
which was to change the face of the world. 

The Puritan resistance of the seventeenth century had in the end 
succeeded in checking, so far as England was concerned, the general 
tendency of the time to rehgious and political despotism. Since the 
Revolution of 1688 freedom of conscience and the people's right to 
govern itself through its representatives in Parliament had been practi- 
cally established. Social equality had begun long before. Every man 
from the highest to the lowest was subject to, and protected by, the 
same law. The English aristocracy, though exercising a powerful 
influence on government, were possessed of few social privileges, and 
prevented from forming a separate class in the nation by the legal and 
social tradition which counted all save the eldest son of a noble house as 
commoners. No impassable line parted the gentry from the commercia. 
classes, and these again possessed no privileges which could part them 
from the lower classes of the community. After a short struggle, public 
opinion, the general sense of educated Englishmen,'had established itself 
as the dominant element in English government. But in all the other 
great states of Europe the wars of religion had left only the name oi 
j freedom. Government tended to a pure despotism. Privilege was 
I supreme in religion, in politics, in society. Society itself rested on a 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



rigid division of classes from one another, which refused to the people 
at large any equal rights of justice or of industry. We have already 
seen how alien such a conception of national life was from the ideas 
which the wide diffusion of intelligence during the eighteenth century 
was spreading throughout Europe ; and in almost every country some 
enlightened rulers endeavoured by administrative reforms in some sort 
to satisfy the sense of wrong which was felt around them. The attempts 
of sovereigns like Frederick the Great in Prussia and Joseph the Second 
in Austria and the Netherlands were rivalled by the efforts of statesmen 
such as Turgot in France. It was in France indeed that the contrast 
between the actual state of society and the new ideas of public right 
was felt most keenly. Nowhere had the victory of the Crown been 
more complete. The aristocracy had been robbed of all share in 
public affairs ; it enjoyed social privileges and exemption from any 
contribution to the public burdens without that sense of public duty 
which a governing class to some degree always possesses. Guilds and 
monopolies at once fettered the industry of the trader and the merchant 
and cut them off from the working classes, as the value attached to noble 
blood cut both off from the aristocracy. 

If its political position indeed were compared with that of most 
of the countries round it, France stood high. Its government was less 
oppressive and more influenced by public opinion, its general wealth 
was larger and more evenly diffused, there was a better administration 
of justice, and greater security for public order. Poor as its peasantry 
seemed to English eyes they were far above the peasants of Germany 
or Spain. Its middle class was the quickest and most intelligent in 
Europe. Opinion under Lewis the Fifteenth was practically free, though 
powerless to influence the government of the country; and a literary class 
had sprung up which devoted itself with wonderful brilliancy and 
activity to popularizing the ideas of social and political justice which 
it learned from English writers, and in the case of Montesquieu and 
Voltaire from personal contact with English life. The moral concep- 
tions of the time, its love of mankind, its sense of human brotherhood, 
its hatred of oppression, its pity for the guilty and the poor, its 
longing after a higher and nobler standard of life and action, were 
expressed by a crowd of writers, and above all by Rousseau, with 
a fire and eloquence which carried them to the heart of the people, 
Everywhere the new force of intelligence jostled roughly with the 
social forms with which it found itself in contact. The philosopher 
denounced the tyranny of the priesthood. The peasant grumbled at 
the lord's right to judge him in his courts and to exact feudal services 
from him. The merchant was galled by the trading restrictions and 
the heavy taxation. The country gentry rebelled against their exclu- 
sion from pubhc life and from the government of the country. Its 
powerlessness to bring about any change at home turned all the new 



774 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap; 



energy into sympathy with a struggle against tyranny abroad. Public 
opinion forced France to ally itself with America in its contest for 
liberty, and French volunteers under the Marquis de Lafayette joined 
Washington's army. But while the war spread more widely throughout 
the nation the craving for freedom, it brought on the Government 
financial embarrassment from which it could only free itself by an appeal 
to the country at large. Lewis the Sixteenth resolved to summon the 
States-General, which had not met since the time of Richelieu, and 
to appeal to the nobles to waive their immunity from taxation. His 
resolve at once stirred into vigorous life every impulse and desire 
which had been seething in the minds of the people ; and the States- 
General no sooner met at Versailles in May 1789 than the fabric 
of despotism and privilege began to crumble. A rising in Paris 
destroyed the Bastille, and the capture of this fortress was taken 
for the sign of a new asra of constitutional freedom for France and for 
Europe. Everywhere men thrilled with a strange joy at the tidings of 
its fall. " How much is this the greatest event that ever happened in 
the world," Fox cried with a burst of enthusiasm ; " and how much 
the best ! " 

Pitt regarded the approach of France to sentiments of liberty which 
had long been familiar to England with characteristic coolness, but 
with no distrust. For the moment, indeed, his attention was distracted 
by an attack of madness which visited the King in 1788, and by the 
claim of a right to the Regency which was at t once advanced by 
the Prince of Wales. The Prince belonged to the Whig party; 
and Fox, who was travelling in Italy, hurried home to support his 
claim in full belief that the Prince's Regency would be followed by 
his own return to power. Pitt successfully resisted it on the constitu- 
tional ground that in such a case the right to choose a temporary regent, 
under what limitations it would, lay with Parliament ; and a bill which 
conferred the Regency on the Prince, in accordance with this view, 
was already passing the Houses when the recovery of the King put an 
end to the long dispute. Abroad, too, Pitt's difficulties were increasing. 
Russia had risen into greatness under Catherine the Second ; and 
Catherine had resolved from the first on the annexation of Poland^ the 
expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and the setting up of a Russian 
throne at Constantinople. In her first aim she was baffled for the 
moment by Frederick the Great. She had already made herself 
virtually mistress of the whole of Poland, her armies occupied the 
kingdom, and she had seated a nominee of her own on its throne, 
when Frederick in union with the Emperor Joseph the Second forced 
her to admit Germany to a share of the spoil. If the first PoKsh 
partition of 1773 brought the Russian frontier westward to the upper 
waters of the Dwina and the Dnieper, it gaye Galicia to Maria 
Theresa, and West Prussia to Frederick himself. Foiled in her first 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



775- 



aim, she waited for the realization of her second till the alliance between i Sec. ill. 
the two German powers was at an end through the resistance of Prussia 
to Joseph's schemes for the annexation of Bavaria, and the death of 
Frederick removed her most watchful foe. Then in 1788 Joseph 
and the Empress joined hands for a partition of the Turkish Empire. 
But Prussia was still watchful, and England was no longer fettered 
as in 1773 by troubles with America. The friendship established by 
Chatham between the two countries, which had been suspended by 
Bute's treachery and all but destroyed during the Northern League of 
Neutral Powers, had been restored by Pitt through his co-operation 
with Frederick's successor in the restoration of the Dutch Stathol- 
derate. Its political weight was now seen in the alliance of England, 
Prussia, and Holland in 1789 for the preservation of the Turkish Empire. 
A great European struggle seemed at hand ; and in such a struggle 
the sympathy and aid of France was of the highest importance. 
But with the treaty the danger passed away. In the spring of 1790 
Joseph died broken-hearted at the failure of his plans and the revolt of 
the Netherlands against his innovations ; and Austria practically 
withdrew from the war with the Turks. 

Meanwhile in France things moved fast. By breaking down the 
division between its separate orders the States-General became a 
National Assembly, and abolished the privileges of the provincial 
parliaments, of the nobles, and the Church. In October the mob 
of'Paris marched on Versailles and forced both King and Assembly 
to return with them to the capital ; and a Constitution, hastily put 
together, was accepted by Lewis the Sixteenth in the stead of his 
old despotic power. To Pitt, the tumult and disorder with which 
these great changes were wrought seemed transient matters. In 
January 1790 he still believed that " the present convulsions in France 
must sooner or later culminate in general harmony and regular 
order," and that when her own freedom was established, "France 
would stand forth as one of the most brilHant powers of Europe." 
But the coolnesss and good-will with which Pitt looked on the 
Revolution was far from being universal in the nation at large. The 
cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen, their love of order and 
Law, their distaste for violent changes and for abstract theories, as well 
as their reverence for the past, were fast rousing throughout the country 
a dislike of the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on across 
the Channel. That the dislike passed slowly into fear and hatred was 
due above all to the impassioned efforts of Edmund Burke. Forty 
years before, Burke had come to London as a poor and unknown Irish 
adventurer. The learning which made him at once the friend of 
Johnson and Reynolds, and the imaginative power which enabled him 
to give his learning a living shape, promised him a philosophical and 
literar)^ career : but instinct drew Burke to politics ; he became secre- j 



776 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



tary to Lord Rockingham, and in 1765 entered Parliament under his 
patronage. His speeches on the Stamp Acts and the American War 
soon lifted him into fame. The heavy Quaker-like figure, the little wig, 
the round spectacles, the cumbrous roll of paper which loaded Burke's 
pocket, gave little promise of a great orator and less of the character- 
istics of his oratory, — its passionate ardour, its poetic fancy, its amazing 
prodigality of resources ; the dazzling succession in which irony, 
pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word-pictures, the 
coolest argument followed each other. It was an eloquence indeed 
of a wholly new order in English experience. Walpole's clearness 
of statement, Chatham's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for the 
impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. " I have 
learned more from him than from all the books I ever read,'' Foi: 
exclaimed with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical 
cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical 
coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was 
poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour 
from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a 
great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose institutions 
were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that to touch it 
rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial scheme of 
government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which was in itself 
a natural outcome of its history and development. In the Revolution of 
1688 Burke saw the fated close of a great asra of national progress which 
had moved on " from precedent to precedent." His temper was in this 
way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not from a love of in- 
action but from a sense of the value of social order, and from an imagi- 
native reverence for all that existed. Every institution was hallowed 
to him by the clear insight with which he discerned its relations to the 
past and its subtle connexion with the social fabric around it. To touch 
even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be risking the ruin of a complex 
structure of national order which it had cost centuries to build up. 
" The equilibrium of the Constitution," he said, " has something so 
delicate about it, that the least displacement may destroy it." " It is a 
difficult and dangerous matter even to touch so complicated a machine." 
Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its 
influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. It left him hostile 
to all movement whatever. He gave his passionate adhesion to the 
helpless inaction of the Whigs. He made an idol of Lord Rockingham, 
an honest man, but the weakest of party leaders. He strove to check 
the corruption of Parliament by his bill for civil retrenchment, but 
he^took the lead in defeating all plans for its reform. Though he was 
the one man in England who understood with Pitt the value of free 
industry, he struggled bitterly against the young Minister's proposals 
to give freedom to Irish trade, and against his Commercial Treaty 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



777 



with France. His work seemed to be that of investing with a 
gorgeous poetry the policy of timid content which the Whigs had 
inherited from Sir Robert Walpole. The very intensity of his behef 
in the natural development of a nation seemed to render him incapable 
of understanding that any good could come from particular laws or 
special reforms. 

It was easy to see in what way a temper such as this would be stirred 
by the changes which were now going on in France. The fall of the 
Bastille, which kindled enthusiasm in Fox, filled Burke with distrust. 
" Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice," he wrote 
a few weeks later, " neither is safe." The night of the fourth of August, 
when the privileges of every class were abolished, filled him with horror. 
He saw, and rightly saw, in it the critical moment which revealed the 
character of the Revolution, and his part was taken at once. " The 
French," he cried in January, while Pitt was foretelling a glorious 
future for the new Constitution, "the French have shown themselves the 
ablest architects of ruin who have hitherto existed in the w^orld. Jn a 
short space of time they have pulled to the ground their army, their 
navy, their commerce, their arts and their manufactures." But in 
Parliament he stood alone. The Whigs, though distrustfully, followed 
Fox in his applause of the Revolution. The Tories, yet more distrust- 
fully, followed Pitt ; and Pitt warmly expressed his sympathy with 
the constitutional government which was ruling France. At this 
moment indeed the revolutionary party gave a signal proof of its 
friendship for England. Irritated by an English settlement at Nootka 
Sound in California, Spain appealed to France for aid in accordance 
with the Family Compact ; and the French Ministry with the consti- 
tutional party at its back resolved on a war as the best means of 
checking the progress of the Revolution and restoring the power of 
the Crown. The revolutionary party naturally opposed this design ; 
after a bitter struggle the right of declaring war, save with the 
sanction of the Assembly, was taken from the King ; and all danger 
of hostiUties passed away. " The French Government," Pitt asserted 
" was bent on cultivating the most unbounded friendship for Great 
Britain," and he saw no reason in its revolutionary changes why 
Britain should not return the friendship of France. He saw that 
nothing but the joint action of France and England would in the end 
arrest the troubles of Eastern Europe. His intervention foiled for the 
moment a fresh effort of Prussia to rob Poland of Dantzic and Thorn. 
But though Russia was still pressing Turkey hard, a Russian war was 
so unpopular in England that a hostile vote in Parliament forced Pitt 
to discontinue his armaments ; and a fresh union of Austria and 
Prussia, which promised at this juncture to bring about a close of the 
Turkish struggle, promised also a fresh attack on the independence of 
Poland. 



778 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



But while Pitt was pleading for friendship between the two coun- 
tries^ Burke was resolved to make friendship impossible. In Parlia- 
ment, as we have seen, he stood alone. He had long ceased, in 
fact, to have any hold over the House of Commons. The eloquence 
which had vied with that of Chatham during the discussions on the 
Stamp Act had become distasteful to the bulk of its members. The 
length of his speeches, the profound and philosophical character of 
his argument, the splendour and often the extravagance of his illustra- 
tions, his passionate earnestness, his want of temper and discretion^ 
wearied and perplexed the squires and merchants about him. He was 
known at last as "the dinner-bell of the House,'' so rapidly did its 
benches thin at his rising. For a time his energies found scope in 
the impeachment of Hastings ; and the grandeur of his appeals to 
the justice of England hushed detraction. But with the close of 
the impeachment his repute had again fallen ; and the approach 
of old age, for he was now past sixty, seemed to counsel retirement 
from an assembly where he stood unpopular and alone. But age and 
disappointment and loneliness were all forgotten as Burke saw rising 
across the Channel the embodiment of all that he hated — a Revolution 
founded on scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole 
social fabric which the past had reared ; the ordered structure o£ classes 
and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality ; a state rudely 
demolished and reconstituted ; a Church and a nobility swept away in a 
night. Against the enthusiasm of what he rightly saw to be a new 
political religion he resolved to rouse the enthusiasm of the old. He 
was at once a gre^t orator and a great writer ; and now that the 
House was deaf to his voice, he appealed to the country by his pen. 
The " Reflections on the French Revolution '' which he published in 
October 1790, not only denounced the acts of rashness and violence 
which sullied the great change that France had wrought, but the 
very principles from which the change had sprung. Burke's deep 
sense of the grandeur of social order, of the value of that continuity 
in human affairs "without which men would become like flies in a 
summer," blinded him to all but the faith in mere rebellion and the yet 
sillier faith in mere novelty which disguised a real nobleness of aim 
and temper even in the most ardent of the revolutionists. He would 
see no abuses in the past, now that it had fallen, or anything but the 
ruin of society in the future. He preached a crusade against men 
whom he regarded as the foes of religion and civilization, and called on 
the armies of Europe to put down a Revolution whose principles 
threatened every state with destruction. 

The great obstacle to such a crusade was Pitt : and one of the 
grandest outbursts of the " Reflections " closed with a bitter taunt at the 
Minister. " The age of chivalry," Burke cried, " is gone ; that of sophis- 
ters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND 



779 



The 
Second 

Pitt. 
1783- 
1789 



Europe is extinguished for ever." But neither taunts nor invective | Sec. hi. 
moved Pitt from his course. At the moment when the " Reflections " 
appeared he gave a fresh assurance to France of his resolve to have 
nothing to do with any crusade against the Revolution. " This 
country," he wrote, " means to persevere in the neutrality hitherto 
scrupulously observed with respect to the internal dissensions of France ; 
and from which it will never depart unless the conduct held there 
makes it indispensable as an act of self-defence." So far indeed 
was he from sharing the reactionary panic which was spreading 
around him that he chose this time for supporting Fox in his Libel 
Act, a measure which, by transferring the decision on what was 
libellous in any publication from, the judge to the jury, completed the 
freedom of the press ; and himself passed in 1791 a Bill which, though 
little noticed among the storms of the time, was one of the noblest of 
his achievements. He boldly put aside the dread which had been 
roused by the American war, that the gift of self-government to our 
colonies would serve only as a step towards their secession from the 
mother country, and established a House of Assembly and a Council 
in the two Canadas. '' I am convinced," said Fox, who gave the 
measure his hearty support, " that the only method of retaining distant 
colonies with advantage is to enable them to govern themselves ; " and 
the policy of the one statesman as well as the foresight of the other 
have been justified by the later history of our dependencies. Nor had 
Burke better success with his own party. Fox remained an ardent 
lover of the Revolution, and answered a fresh attack of Burke upon 
it with more than usual warmth. A close affection had bound till 
now the two men together ; but the fanaticism of Burke declared 
it at an end. " There is no loss of friendship," Fox exclaimed, with 
a sudden burst of tears. " There is ! " Burke repeated. " I know 
the price of my conduct. Our friendship is at an end." Within the 
walls of Parliament, Burke stood utterly alone. His "Appeal from the 
New to the Old Whigs," in June 1791, failed to detach a follower 
from Fox. Pitt coldly counselled him rather to praise the English 
Constitution than to rail at the French. " I have made many enemies 
and few friends," Burke wrote sadly to the French princes who had fled 
from their country and were gathering in arms at Coblentz, ^' by the part 
I have taken." But the opinion of the people was slowly drifting to his 
side. A sale of thirty thousand copies showed that the " Reflections " 
echoed the general sentiment of Englishmen. The mood of England 
indeed at this moment was unfavourable to any fair appreciation of the 
Revolution across the Channel. Her temper was above all industrial. 
Men who were working hard and fast growing rich, who had the narrow 
and practical turn of men of business, looked angrily at its sudden dis- 
turbance of order, its restless and vague activity, its rhetorical appeals 
to human feeling, its abstract and often empty theories. In England it 



7So 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



was a time of political content and social well-being, of steady economic 
progress, and of a powerful religious revival ; and the insular want of 
imaginative interest in other races hindered men from seeing that every 
element of this content, of this order, of this peaceful and harmonious 
progress, of this reconciliation of society and religion, was wanting 
abroad. The general sympathy which the Revolution had at first 
attracted passed slowly into disgust at the violence of its legislative 
changes, the anarchy of the country, the bankruptcy of its treasury, 
and the growing power of the mob of Paris. Sympathy in fact was 
soon limited to a few groups of reformers who gathered in " Constitu- 
tional Clubs," and whose reckless language only furthered the national 
reaction. But in spite of Burke's appeals and the cries of the nobles 
who had fled from France and longed only to march against their 
country, Europe held back from war, and Pitt preserved his attitude 
of neutrality, though with a greater appearance of reserve. 

So anxious, in fact, did the aspect of affairs in the East make Pitt 
for the restoration of tranquillity in France, that he foiled a plan which 
its emigrant nobles had formed for a descent on the French coast, 
and declared formally at Vienna that England would remain absolutely 
neutral should hostilities arise between France and the Emperor. 
But the Emperor was as anxious to avoid a French war as Pitt him- 
self. Though Catherine, now her war with Turkey was over, wished 
to plunge the two German powers into a struggle with the Revolution 
which would leave her free to annex Poland single-handed, neither 
Leopold nor Prussia would tie their hands by such a contest. The 
flight of Lewis the Sixteenth from Paris in June 1791 brought Europe 
for a moment to the verge of war ; but he was intercepted and brought 
back ; and for a while the danger seemed to incline the revolutionists 
in France to greater moderation. Lewis too not only accepted the Con- 
stitution, but pleaded earnestly with the Emperor against any armed 
intervention as certain to bring ruin to his throne. In their conference 
at Pillnitz therefore, in August, Leopold and the King of Prussia con- 
tented themselves with a vague declaration inviting the European 
powers to co-operate in restoring a sound form of government in 
France, availed themselves of England's neutrality to refuse all mili- 
tary aid to the French princes, and dealt simply with the affairs of 
Poland. But the peace they desired soon became impossible. The 
Constitutional Royalists in France availed themselves of the irritation 
caused by the Declaration of Pillnitz to rouse again the cry for a war 
which, as they hoped, would give strength to the throne. The Jacobins, 
on the other hand, under the influence of the " Girondists,'' or deputies. 
from the south of France, whose aim was a republic, and who saw m 
a great national struggle a means of overthrowing the monarchy, 
decided in spite of the opposition .of Robespierre on a contest with 
the Emperor. Both parties united to demand the breaking up of an 



x.i 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



78r 



army which the emigrant princes had formed on the Rhine ; and 
though Leopold assented to this demand, France declared war against 
his successor, Francis, in April 1792. 

Misled by their belief in a revolutionary enthusiasm in England, 
the French ConstitutionaHsts had hoped for her alliance in this war ; 
but though Pitt at once refused aid and stipulated that Holland 
must remain untouched, he promised neutrality even though Belgium 
should for a time be occupied by a French army. In the same temper 
he announced in 1792 a reduction of military forces, and brought 
forward a Peace Budget which rested on a large remission of taxation. 
But peace grew hourly more impossible. The French revolutionists, 
in their eagerness to find an ally in their war, were striving by intrigues 
with the Constitutional Clubs to rouse the spirit in England which 
they had roused in France. The French ambassador, Chauvelin, 
boldly protested against a proclamation which denounced this seditious 
correspondence. Even Fox, at such a moment, declared that the 
discussion of Parliamentary reform was inexpedient. Meanwhile 
Burke was working hard, in writings whose extravagance of style was 
forgotten in their intensity of feeling, to spread alarm throughout 
Europe. He had from the first encouraged the emigrant princes to 
take arms, and sent his son to join them at Coblentz. "Be alarmists," 
he wrote to them ; *' diftuse terror ! " But the royalist terror which he 
sowed had at last roused a revolutionary terror in France itself. At 
the threat of war against the Emperor the two German Courts had 
drawn together, and reluctantly abandoning all hope of peace with 
France, gathered eighty thousand men under the Duke of Brunswick, 
and advanced slowly in August on the Meuse. France, though she had 
forced on the struggle, was really almost defenceless ; her army in 
Belgium broke at the first shock of arms into shameful rout ; and the 
panic, spreading from the army to the nation at large, took violent and 
horrible forms. At the first news of Brunswick's advance the mob of 
Paris broke into the Tuileries on the loth of August ; and on its demand 
Lewis, who had taken refuge in the Assembly, was suspended from 
his office and imprisoned in the Temple. From this moment the 
Revolution, if by the Revolution we mean the progress of France 
towards political, social, and religious freedom, was at an end. The 
populace of Paris, with the Commune of Paris at its head, imposed 
its will upon the Assembly and upon the nation. The only changes 
which France was for a long time to experience were changes of 
masters ; but whether the Commune or the Directory or Buonaparte 
were its despot, the government was a simple despotism. And des- 
potism, as ever, began its work with bloodshed and terror. While 
General Dumouriez by boldness and adroit negotiations arrested the 
progress of the allies in the defiles of the Argonne, bodies of paid 
murderers butchered in September the royalist prisoners who crowded 



Sec. III. 

TrtE 
Second 

Pitt. 
1783- 
1789. 

Pitt's 
Struggle 
for Peace. 



782 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



the gaols of Paris, with a view of influencing the elections to a new 
Convention which met to proclaim the abolition of royalty. The 
retreat of Brunswick's army, whose numbers had been reduced by 
disease till an advance on Paris became impossible, and a brilhant 
victory won by Dumouriez at Jemappes which laid the Netherlands at 
his feet, turned the panic of the French into a wild self-confidence. 
In November the Convention decreed that France offered the aid of 
her soldiers to all nations who would strive for freedom. "All Govern- 
ments are our enemies," said its President; "all peoples are our alHes." 
In the teeth of treaties signed only two years before, and without any 
pretext for war, the French Government resolved to attack Holland, 
and ordered its generals to enforce by arms the opening of the Scheldt. 
To do this was to force England into war. Public opinion was 
pressing harder day by day upon Pitt. The horror of the massacres 
of September, the hideous despotism of the Parisian mob, had done 
more to estrange England from the Revolution than all the eloquence 
of Burke. But even while withdrawing our Minister from Paris on 
the imprisonment of the King, Pitt clung stubbornly to the hope of 
peace. He had hindered Holland from joining the coalition against 
France. His hope was to bring the war to an end through English me- 
diation, and to "leave France, which I believe is the best way, to 
arrange its own internal affairs as it can." No hour of Pitt's life is so 
great as the hour when he stood alone in England, and refused to bow 
to the growing cry of the nation for war. Even the news of the 
September massacres could only force from him a hope that France 
might abstain from any war of conquest and escape from its social 
anarchy. In October the French agent in England reported that Pitt 
was about to recognize the Republic. At the opening of November 
he still pressed on Holland a steady neutrality. It was France, and 
not England, which at last wrenched from his grasp the peace to which 
he clung so desperately. The decree of the Convention and the attack 
on the Dutch left him no choice but war, for it was impossible for | 
England to endure a French fleet at Antwerp, or to desert allies like 
the United Provinces. But even in December the news of the ap- 
proaching partition of Poland nerved him to a last struggle for peace ; 
he offered to aid Austria in acquiring Bavaria if she would make terms 
with France, and pledged himself to France to abstain from war if 
that power would cease from violating the independence of her neigh- 
bour states. But across the Channel his moderation was only taken 
for fear, while in England the general mourning which followed on 
the news of the French King's execution showed the growing ardour - 
for the inevitable contest. Both sides now ceased from diplomatic I 
communications, and in February 1793 France issued her Declaration jl 
of War. 



X.1 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



7S3 



Section IV.— The War with France. 1793—1815. 

{Authorities. — To those mentioned before we may add Moore's Life of Sheri- 
dan; the Lives of Lord Castlereagh, Lord Eldon, and Lord Sidmouth ; Romilly^s 
Memoirs ; Lord Comwalhs's Correspondence ; Mr. Yonge^s Life of Lord 
Liverpool ; the Diaries and Correspondence of Lord Malmesbury, Lord 
Colchester, and Lord Auckland. For the general history of England at 
this time, see Alison's ** History of Europe;" for its military history, Sir 
William Napier's ** History of the Peninsular War."] 



From the moment when France declared war against England Pitt's 
power was at an end. His pride, his immovable firmness, and the 
general confidence of the nation still kept him at the head of affairs ; 
but from this moment he drifted along with a tide of popular feeling 
which he never fully understood. The very excellences of his 
character unfitted him for the conduct of a war. He was in fact a 
Peace Minister, forced into war by a panic and enthusiasm which he 
shared in a very small degree, and unaided by his father's gift of at 
once entering into the sympathies and passions around him, or of 
rousing passions and sympathies in return. Politically indeed his task 
at home became an easy one, for the nation was united by its longing to 
fight. Even the bulk of the Whigs, with the Duke of Portland, Lords 
Fitzwilliam and Spenser, and Mr. Wyndham at their head, deserted 
Fox when he remained firm in his love of France and of the Revolution, 
and gave their support to the ministry. Abroad all seemed at first to 
go ill for France. She was girt in by a ring of enemies : the 
Emperor, Prussia, Saxony, Sardinia, and Spain were leagued in arms 
against her, and their efforts were seconded by civil war. The peasants 
of Poitou and Brittany rose in revolt against the Revolutionary go- 
vernment. Marseilles and Lyons were driven into insurrection by the 
Jacobins, as the more violent leaders who had now seized the supreme 
power were called, and a great naval port, that of Toulon, not only 
hoisted the royalist flag, but admitted an English garrison within its 
walls. The French armies had already been driven back from Belgium 
and across the Rhine, when ten thousand English soldiers, under the 
Duke of York, joined the Austrians in Flanders in 1 793. But the chance 
of crushing the Revolution was lost by the greed and incapacity of the 
allied powers. Russia, as Pitt had foreseen, was now free to carry 
out her schemes in the East ; and Austria and Prussia turned from 
the vigorous prosecution of the French war to the final partition of 
Poland. The allies frittered away in sieges the force which was ready 
for an advance into the heart of France until the revolt of the West and 
South was alike drowned in blood. Whatever were the crimes and 
violence of the Jacobin leaders at this critical moment, France felt 
in spite of them the value of the Revolution, and rallied enthusias- 



Sec. IV. 
The Was 

WITH 

France. 
1793- 
1815. 



France 

and tlie 

Coalition. 



784 



HISTORY OF 7'HE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



tically to its support. In 1794 the English were driven from Toulon 
by a young artillery officer from Corsica, whose name was to become 
famous, Napoleon Buonaparte ; while a victory at Fleurus again made 
the French masters of the Netherlands. At this moment, too, the over- 
throw and death of their leader, Maximilian Robespierre, brought 
about the downfall of the Jacobins, and a more moderate govern- 
ment which succeeded, the government of the Directory, united the 
whole people in the defence of the country. Victory everywhere 
followed on the gigantic efforts with which France met the coalition 
against it. Spain was forced to sue for peace, the Sardinians were 
driven over the Alps, the provinces along the Rhine were wrested from 
the Austrians, and the starving and unshod soldiers of the Republic 
threw back the English army from the Waal and the Meuse and entered 
Amsterdam in triumph. 

The victories of France broke up the confederacy which had threat- 
ened it with destruction. Spain, Sweden, and Prussia hastened to 
make peace with the French Republic. Pitt himself became earnest 
for peace. He was indeed without means of efficiently carrying on the 
war. The Enghsh army was small and without military experience, 
while its leaders were utterly incapable. " We have no General," wrote 
Lord Grenville, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, "but some old woman 
in a red riband.'' Nor was weakness and defeat Pittas only ground for 
desiring the close of the war. Inflexible and impassive as he seemed, 
he felt bitterly that the contest was undoing all that he had done. The 
growth of the public burdens was terrible. If England was without 
soldiers, she had wealth, and Pitt was forced to turn her wealth into am 
engine of war. He became the paymaster of the Coalition, and his sub- 
sidies brought the allied armies into the field. Immense loans were raised 
for this purpose and for a war expenditure at home which was as useless 
as it was extravagant. The public debt rose by leaps and bounds. 
Taxation, which had reached its lowest point under Pitt's peace admi- 
nistration, mounted to a height undreamed of before. The public 
suffering was increased by a general panic. Burke had been only too 
successful in his resolve to "diffuse the terror." The partisans of 
France and of republicanism in England were in reality but a few 
handfuls of men, who played at gathering conventions and at calling 
themselves citizens and patriots in childish imitation of what was going 
on across the Channel. But the dread of Revolution soon passed 
beyond the bounds of reason. Even Pitt, though still utterly untouched 
by the political reaction around him, was shaken by the dream of social 
danger, and believed in the existence of " thousands of bandits," who 
were ready to rise against the throne, to murder every landlord, and 
to sack London. " Paine is no fool," he said to his niece, who quoted 
to him the " Rights of Man," in which that author had vindicated the 
principles of the Revolution ; "he is perhaps right ; but if I did what 



X.1 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



785 



he wants, I should have thousands of bandits on my hands to-morrow, 
and London burnt." He shared the behef in a social danger with 
Parliament and with the nation at large. The Habeas Corpus Act was 
suspended, a bill against seditious assemblies restricted the liberty of 
public meeting, and a wider scope was given to the Statute of Treasons. 
Prosecution after prosecution was directed against the Press ; the ser- 
mons of some dissenting ministers were indicted as seditious ; and the 
conventions of sympathizers with France were roughly broken up. The 
worst excesses of the panic were witnessed in Scotland, where young 
Whigs, whose only offence was an advocacy of Parliamentaiy reform, 
were sentenced to transportation, and where a brutal judge openly 
expressed his regret that the practice of torture in seditious cases should 
have fallen into disuse. In England, however, the social panic soon 
passed away as suddenly as it had come. In 1794 three leaders of the 
Corresponding Society, a body which professed sympathy with France, 
Hardy, Thelwall, and Home Tooke, were brought to trial on a charge 
of high treason, but their acquittal proved that the terror was over. 
Save for occasional riots, to which the poor were goaded by sheer want 
of bread, no social disturbance appeared in England through the 
^rwenty years of the war. 

But though failure abroad and panic and suffering at home made 

"^itt earnest to close the struggle with the Revolution, he stood almost 

• done in his longings for peace. The nation at large was still ardent 

or war, and its ardour was fired by Burke in his "Letters on a Regicide 

^eace," which denounced Pittas attempt in 1796 to negotiate with 

f'rance. Nor was France less ardent for war than England. Her 

victories had roused hopes of wider conquests, and though General 

Moreau was foiled in a march on Vienna, the wonderful successes of 

..Tapoleon Buonaparte, who now took the command of the army of 

le Alps, laid Piedmont at her feet. The year 1797 saw Lombardy 

onquered in a single campaign ; and while Spain allied herself with 

l^'rance, and Prussia concluded a treaty of amity, Austria was forced 

to purchase peace in the treaty of Campo Formio by the cession of 

the Netherlands and Milanese to the French Republic. England was 

left without a single ally. Her credit had sunk to the lowest ebb, and 

' le alarm of a French invasion brought about a suspension of cash 

lyments on the part of the Bank, while a mutiny of the fleet which 

mtinued for three months was ended by humihating concessions. 

was in this darkest hour of the struggle that Burke passed away, 

otesting to the last against the peace which, in spite of his previous 

ilure, Pitt tried in 1797 to negotiate at Lille. But the Minister's 

x)rts were again foiled by the unquenched hatred of the two nations. 

French threat of invasion put an end to the depression and dis- 

'ion which had grown up in England. Credit revived, and in spite 

" the enormous taxation a public subscription poured two millions 

3 E 



Sec. IV. 
The Wak 

WITH 

France. 
1793- 
1816, 



Process 
of the 
War, 



786 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chaf. 



into the Treasury towards the expenses of the war. Great mihtary 
and naval trmmphs restored the confidence of the nation. In rejecting 
Pitt's offers of peace the Directory had counted on a rising which 
was looked for in Ireland, and on a war in India where Tippoo 
Sahib, the successor of Hyder Ali in Mysore, had vowed to drive 
the English from the south. But in 1798 the Irish rising was 
crushed in a defeat of the insurgents at Vinegar Hill ; and Tippoo's 
death in the storm of his own capital, Seringapatam, only saved 
him from witnessing the English conquest of Mysore. A yet 
greater success awaited the British flag at sea. Throughout the 
war England had maintained her naval supremacy, and the triumphs 
of her seamen were in strange contrast with her weakness on land. 
At the outset of the contest the French fleet was defeated and crippled 
by Lord Howe in a victory which bore the name of the day on which 
it was won, June 21st, 1794. When Spain joined the French, her 
fleet was attacked in 1796 by Admiral Jervis off Cape St. Vincent, 
and driven with terrible loss back to Cadiz. When Holland was con- 
quered by France, her navy was used by the conquerors to attack the 
Enghsh in the Channel with a view to a descent on Ireland. But 
the Dutch fleet from the Texel was met by a fleet under Admiral 
Duncan, and almost annihilated in a battle off Camperdown in 
1797, an obstinate struggle which showed the Hollanders still worthy 
of their old renown. The next year saw the crowning victory of the 
Nile. After his successes in Italy Napoleon Buonaparte had con- 
ceived the design of a conquest of Egypt and Syria, a march upon 
Constantinople, and the subjection of the Turkish Empire. Only the 
first step in this vast project was fated to be realized. He landed 
in Egypt, and by a defeat of the Mamelukes soon reduced that country 
to submission. But the thirteen men-of-war which had escorted his 
expedition were found by Admiral Nelson in Aboukir Bay, moored 
close to the shore in a line guarded at either end by gun-boats and 
batteries. Nelson resolved to thrust his own ships between the 
French and the shore ; his flagship led the way ; and after a terrible 
fight of twelve hours, nine of the French vessels were captured and 
destroyed, two were burnt, and five thousand French seamen were 
killed or made prisoners. 

The battle of the Nile and the failure of Buonaparte in an invasion 
of Syria aided Pitt to revive the coalition of the continental powers 
against France. A union of the Russian and Austrian armies drove 
the French back again across the Alps and the Rhine. Italy and the 
Rhineland were lost, and only the tenacity of General Massena held 
Switzerland for the Republic. The part which England took in this 
struggle was an invasion of Holland by a force under the Duke of 
York, which ended in miserable failure; but an Enghsh captain^ 
Sir Sidney Smith, foiled Buonaparte's projects on Syria by his defence 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



787 



of Acre, and the French General, despairing of further success, 
abandoned his army, which surrendered at a later time to a British 
expedition, and returned to Europe. The confidence of Pitt in 
the success of the Coalition for the first time blinded him to the 
opening for peace that offered itself in the new position of French 
affairs which was brought about by Buonaparte's return, by his over- 
throw of the Directory, and his elevation to the office of First Consul 
of the Republic. His offers, of peace were no doubt intended simply to 
dissolve the Coalition, and gain breathing time for a new organization 
of France and a new attack on Europe ; but their rejection by England 
was intemperate and unwise. The military genius of the First Consul, 
however, soon reversed the hopes of the Allies. In 1800 he crossed the 
St. Bernard, and by his victory at Marengo forced Austria to conclude a 
peace at Luneville which fixed the frontiers of France at the Rhine, and 
established a Cisalpine Republic, entirely dependent on her, in Lom- 
bardy. At the same time the surrender to England of the island of 
Malta, which had been taken from the Knights of St. John by a French 
fleet, and had ever since been blockaded by English ships, stirred the 
resentment of the Czar Peter, who looked on himself as the patron 
of the Knights ; and at his instigation Sweden and Denmark joined 
Russia in a league of armed neutrality, and protested against the right 
of search by which. England prevented the importation to France in 
neutral vessels of materials which might be used in war. 

But it was at this moment, when England stood once more alone, that 
Pitt won the greatest of his political triumphs in the union of Ireland 
with England. The history of Ireland, from its conquest by William 
the Third up to this time, is one which no EngHshman can recall 
without shame. Since the surrender of Limerick every Catholic Irish- 
man, and there were five Catholics to every Protestant, had been 
treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own country. The House 
of Lords, the House of Commons, the right of voting for representa- 
tives in Parliament, the magistracy, all corporate offices in towns, all 
ranks in the army, the bench, the bar, the whole administration of 
government or justice, were closed against Catholics. Few Catholic 
landowners had been left by the sweeping confiscations which had 
foUowed the successive revolts of the island, and oppressive laws forced 
even these few with scant exceptions to profess Protestantism. Neces- 
sity, indeed, had brought about a practical toleration of their religion 
and their worship ; but in all social and political matters the native 
CathoHcs, in other words the immense majority of the people of 
Ireland, were simply hewers of wood and drawers of water to their 
Protestant masters, who still looked on themselves as mere settlers, 
who boasted of their Scotch or English extraction, and who re- 
garded the name of '^ Irishman " as an insult. But small as was this 
Protestant body, one half of it fared little better, as far as power was 

322 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH 

Fpjvnce. 
1793- 
1815, 



Ireland 
under the 
Georges. 



788 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



concerned, than the Catholics ; for the Presbyterians, who formed the 
■^ulk of the Ulster settlers, were shut out by law from all civil, military, 
and municipal offices. The administration and justice of the country 
were thus kept rigidly in the hands of members of the Established 
Church, a body which comprised about a twelfth of the population 
of the island ; while its government was practically monopolised by a 
few great Protestant landowners. The rotten boroughs, which had 
originally been created to make the Irish Parliament dependent on the 
Crown, had by this time fallen under the influence of the adjacent 
landlords ; whose command of these made them masters of the 
House of Commons, while they formed in person the House of Peers. 
To such a length had this system been carried that at the time of the 
Union more dian sixty seats were in the hands of three families alone, 
— that of Lord Downshire, of the Ponsonbys, and of the Beresfords. 
One half of the House of Commons, in fact, was returned by a small 
group of nobles, who were recognized as "parliamentary under- 
takers," and who undertook to '^manage" Parliament on their own 
terms. Irish politics were for these men a mere means of public 
plunder ; they were glutted with pensions, preferments, and bribes in 
hard cash in return for their services ; they were the advisers of every 
Lord- Lieutenant, and the practical governors of the country. The 
result was what might have been expected ; and for more than a 
century Ireland was the worst governed country in Europe. That its 
government was not even worse than it was, was due to its connection 
with England and the subordination of its Parliament to the English 
Privy Council. The Irish Parliament had no power of originating 
legislative or financial measures, and could only say ^^ yes " or " no " to 
Acts submitted to it by the Privy Council in England. The English 
Parliament, too, claimed the right of binding Ireland as well as England 
by its enactments, and one of its statutes transferred the appellate 
jurisdiction of the Irish Peerage to the English House of Lords. 
Galling as these restrictions were to the plundering aristocracy of 
Ireland, they formed a useful check on its tyranny. But as if to 
compensate for the benefits of this protection, England did her best 
to annihilate Irish commerce and to ruin Irish agriculture. Statutes 
passed by the jealousy of English landowners forbad the export of 
Irish cattle or sheep to English ports. The export of wool was for- 
bidden, lest it might interfere with the profits of English wool-growers. 
Poverty was thus added to the curse of misgovernment, and poverty 
deepened with the rapid growth of the native population, till famine 
turned the country into a hell. 

The bitter lesson of the last conquest, however, long sufficed 
to check all dreams of revolt among the natives, and the murders and 
riots which sprang from time to time out of the general misery and 
discontent were roughly repressed by the ruling class. When revolt 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



789 



threatened at last, the threat came from the ruling class itself. Some 
timid efforts made by the English Government at the accession of 
George the Third to control its tyranny were answered by a refusal of 
money bills, and by a cry for the removal of the checks imposed on 
the independence of the Irish Parliament. But it was not till the 
American war that this cry became a political danger. The threat of 
a French invasion and the want of any regular force to oppose it com- 
pelled the Government to call on Ireland to provide for its own defence, 
and forty thousand volunteers appeared in arms in 1779. The force 
was wholly a Protestant one, commanded by Protestant officers, and 
it was turned to account by the Protestant aristocracy. Threats of an 
armed revolt backed the eloquence of two Parliamentary leaders, 
Grattan and Flood, in their demand of " Irish independence ; " and 
the Volunteers bid for the sympathy of the native Catholics, who 
looked with indifference on these quarrels of their masters, by claiming 
for them a relaxation of the penal laws against the exercise of their 
religion and of some of their most oppressive disabilities. So real 
was the danger that England was forced to give way ; and Lord 
Rockingham induced the British Parliament to abandon in 1782 
the judicial and legislative supremacy it had till then asserted over 
that of Ireland. From this moment England and Ireland were simply 
held together by the fact that the sovereign of the one island was also 
the sovereign of the other. During the next eighteen years Ireland 
was " independent ; " but its independence was a mere name for the 
uncontrolled rule of a few noble famihes. The victory of the Volun- 
teers had been won simply to the profit of the " undertakers," who 
returned the majority of members in the Irish House of Commons, 
and themselves formed the Irish House of Lords. The suspension of 
any control or interference from England left Ireland at these men's 
mercy, and they soon showed that they meant to keep it for themselves. 
When the Cathohcs claimed admission to the franchise or to equal 
civil rights as a reward for their aid in the late struggle, their claim 
was rejected. A similar demand of the Presbyterians, who had formed 
a good half of the Volunteers, for the removal of their disabilities was 
equally set aside. Even Grattan, when he pleaded for a reform which 
would make the Parliament at least a fair representative of the Protes- 
tant Englishry, utterly failed. The ruhng class found government too 
profitable to share it with other possessors. It was only by hard 
bribery that the English Government could secure their co-operation in 
the simplest measures of administration. "If ever there was a countr}' 
-mfit to govern itself," said Lord Hutchinson, "it is Ireland. A corrupt 
aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted Government, a divided 
people ! " The real character of this Parliamentary rule was seen in 
the rejection of Pitt's offer of free trade. In Pitt's eyes the danger of 
Ireland lay not so much in its factious aristocracy as in the misery of 



790 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



the people they governed. Although the Irish Catholics were held 
down by the brute force of their Protestant rulers, he saw that their 
discontent was growing fast into rebellion, and that one secret of their 
discontent at any rate lay in Irish poverty, a poverty increased if not 
originally brought about by the jealous exclusion of Irish products 
from their natural markets in England itself. One of his first com- 
mercial measures put an end to this exclusion by a bill which established 
freedom of trade between the two islands. But though he met success- 
fully the fears andjealousies of the English farmers and manufacturers, 
he was foiled by the factious ignorance of the Irish landowners, and his 
bill was rejected by the Irish Parliament. So utterly was he discouraged 
that only the outbreak of the Revolutionary struggle, and the efforts 
which France at once made to excite rebellion amongst the Irish 
Catholics, roused him to fresh measures of conciliation and good 
government. In 1792 he forced on the Irish Parliament measures for 
the admission of Catholics to the electoral franchise, and to civil and 
military offices within the island, which promised to open a new era of 
religious liberty. But the promise came too late. The hope of con- 
ciliation was lost in the fast rising tide of religious and social passion. 
An association of " United Irishmen,'' begun among the Protestants 
of Ulster with a view of obtaining Parliamentary reform, drifted into 
a correspondence with France and projects of insurrection. The 
Catholic peasantry, brooding over their misery and their wrongs, were 
equally stirred by the news from France ; and their discontent broke 
out in the outrages of " Defenders " and " Peep-o'-day Boys," who 
held the country in terror. For a while, however, the Protestant land- 
owners, banded together in " Orange Societies," held the country down 
by sheer terror and bloodshed. 

At last the smouldering discontent and disaffection burst into flame. 
Ireland was in fact driven into rebellion by the lawless cruelty of the 
Orange yeomanry and the English troops. In 1 796 and 1 797 soldiers 
and yeomanry marched over the country torturing and scourging 
the " croppies," as the Irish insurgents were called in derision from 
their short-cut hair, robbing, ravishing, and murdering. Their out- 
rages were sanctioned by a Bill of Indemnity passed by the Irish 
Parliament ; and protected for the future by an Insurrection Act and 
a suspension of the Habeas Corpus. Meanwhile the United Irishmen 
prepared for an insurrection, which was delayed by the failure of the 
French expeditions on which they counted for support, and above all 
by the victory of Camperdown. Atrocities were answered by atrocities 
when the revolt at last broke out in 1798. Loyal Protestants were 
lashed and tortured in their turn, and every soldier taken was 
butchered without mercy. The rebels however no sooner mustered 
fifteen thousand men strong in a camp on Vinegar Hill near Ennis- 
corthy than the camp was stormed by the English troops, and the 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



revolt utterly suppressed. The suppression only just came in time to 
prevent greater disasters. A few weeks after the close of the rebellion a 
thousand French soldiers under General Humbert landed in Mayo, 
broke a force of thrice their number in a battle at Castlebar, and only 
surrendered when the Lord- Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis, faced them 
with thirty thousand men. Lord Cornwallis, a wise and humane ruler, 
found more difficulty in checking the reprisals of his troops and 
of the Orangemen than in stamping out the last embers of insurrec- 
tion ; but the hideous cruelty brought about one good result. 
Pitt's disgust at "the bigoted fury of Irish Protestants" ended in 
a firm resolve to put an end to the farce of " Independence," which 
left Ireland helpless in their hands. The political necessity for a union 
of the two islands had already been brought home to every English 
statesman by the course of the Irish Parliament during the disputes 
over the Regency ; for, while England repelled the claims of the 
Prince of Wales to the Regency as of right, Ireland admitted them. 
As the only union left between the two peoples was their obedience to 
a common mler, such an act might conceivably have ended in their 
entire severance ; and the sense of this danger secured a welcome on 
this side of the Channel for Pitt's proposal to unite the two Parliaments. 
The opposition of the Irish bcroughmongers was naturally stubborn 
and determined. But with them it was a sheer question of gold \ and 
the assent of the Irish Parliament was bought with a million in money, 
and with a liberal distribution of pensions and peerages to its members. 
Base and shameless as such means were, Pitt may fairly plead that 
they were the or.ly means by which the bill for the Union could 
have been passed. As the matter was finally arranged in June 1800, 
one hundred Irish laembers became part of the House of Commons at 
Westminster, and twenty-eight temporal with four spiritual peers, 
chosen for each Parliament by their fellows, took their seats in the 
House of Lords. Commerce between the two countries was freed 
from all restrictions, and all the trading privileges of the one were 
thrown open to the other ; while taxation was proportionately dis- 
tributed between the t^vo peoples. 

The lavish creation of peers which formed a part of the price paid 
for the Union of Ireland was only an instance of Pitt's deliberate policy 
in dealing with the peerage. If he had failed to reform the House of 
Commons, he was able to bring about a practical change in our con- 
stitution by his refom. of the House of Lords. Few bodies have 
varied more in the number of their members. At the close of the 
Wars of the Roses only thirty lay lords remained to take their seats ; 
in Elizabeth's reign they numbered only sixty ; the prodigal creations 
of the Stuarts raised them to one hundred and sixty-eight. At this 
point, however, tley practically remained stationary during the reigns 
of the first two Georges ; and, as we have seen, only the dogged 



792 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



opposition of Walpole prevented Lord Stanhope from limiting the 
peerage to the number it had at that time reached. Mischievous as 
such a measure would have been, it would at any rate have prevented 
the lavish creation of peerages on which George the Third relied in the 
early days of his reign as one of his means of breaking up the party 
government which restrained him. But what was with the King a 
mere means of corruption became with Pitt a settled purpose of 
transferring the peerage from a narrow and exclusive caste into a large 
representation of the wealth of England. As he defined his aim, it 
was to use the House of Lords as a means of rewarding merit, to 
bring the peerage into closer relations with the landowning and opulent 
classes, and to render the Crown independent of factious combinations 
among the existing peers. While himself therefore disdainful of 
hereditary honours, he lavished them as no Minister had lavished them 
before. In his first five years of rule he created fifty new peers. In two 
later years alone, 1796-7, he created thirty-five. By 1801 the peerages 
which were the price of the Union with Ireland had helped to raise 
his creations to one hundred and forty-one. So busily was his example 
followed by his successors that at the end of George the Third^s reign 
the number of hereditary peers had become double what it was at his 
accession. Nor was the change in the peerage merely one of numbers. 
The whole character of the House of Lords was changed. Up to 
this time it had been a small assembly of great nobles, bound together 
by family or party ties into a distinct power in the State. By pouring 
into it members of the middle and commercial class, who formed the 
basis of his political power, small landowners, bankers, merchants, 
nabobs, army contractors, lawyers, soldiers and seamen, Pitt revolu- 
tionized the Upper House. It became the stronghold, not of blood, 
but of property, the representative of the great estates and great 
fortunes which the vast increase of English wealth was building up. 
For the first time, too, in our history it became ttje distinctly conserva- 
tive element in our constitution. The full imfort of Pitt's changes 
has still to be revealed, but in some ways their Results have been very 
different from the end at which he aimed. Thelarger numbers of the 
peerage, though due to the will of the Crown, l^s practically freed the 
House from any influence which the Crown can pxert by the distribution 
of honours. This change, since the power qf the Crown has been 
practically wielded by the House of Commojis, has rendered it far 
harder to reconcile the free action of the Lordi with the regular work- 
ing of constitutional government. On the other hand, the larger 
number of its members has rendered the House more responsive to 
public opinion, when public opinion is strongly pronounced ; and the 
political tact which is inherent in great aristocratic assembhes has 
hitherto presented any collision with the Lower House from being 
pushed to an irreconcileable quarrel. Perhaps the most direct result 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



793 



of the change is seen in the undoubted popularity of the House of 
Lords with the mass of the people. The large number of its members, 
and the constant additions to them from almost every class of the 
community, has secured it as yet from the suspicion and ill will which 
in almost every other constitutional country has hampered the effective 
working of a second legislative chamber. 

But the legislative union of the two countries was only part of the 
great plan which Pitt had conceived for the conciliation of Ireland. 
With the conclusion of the Union his projects of free trade between 
the two countries, which had been defeated a few years back by the 
folly of the Irish Parliament, came quietly into play ; and in spite of 
insufficient capital and social disturbance, the growth of the trade, 
shipping, and manufactures of Ireland has gone on without a check 
from that time to this. The change which brought Ireland directly 
under the common Parliament was followed too by a gradual revision 
of its oppressive laws and an amendment in their administration ; 
taxation was lightened, and a faint beginning made of public instruction. 
But in Pitf s mind the great means of conciliation was the concession j 
of religious equality. In proposing to the English Parlianfent thej 
union of the two countries he had pointed out that, when thus joined ! 
to a Protestant country like England, all danger of a Catholic supremacy j 
in Ireland, should Catholic disabilities be removed, would be practically ! 
at an end ; and had suggested that in such a case " an effectual and 
adequate provision for the Catholic clergy " w^ould be a security for 
their loyalty. His words gave strength to the hopes of " Catholic 
Emancipation," or the removal of the civil disabilities of Catholics, 
which were held out by Lord Castlereagh in Ireland itself as means of 
hindering any opposition to the project of Union on the part of the 
Catholics. It was agreed on all sides that their opposition would have 
secured its defeat ; but no Catholic opposition showed itself. After 
the passing of the bill, Pitt prepared to lay before the Cabinet a 
measure which would have raised not only the Catholic but the 
Dissenter to perfect equality of civil rights. He proposed to remove 
all religious tests which limited the exercise of the franchise, or were 
required for admission to Parliament, the magistracy, the bar, 
municipal offices, or posts in the army or the service of the State. 
Political security was provided for by the imposition, in the place of 
the Sacramental Test, of an oath of allegiance and of fidelity to the 
Constitution ; while the loyalty of the Catholic and Dissenting 
clergy was secured by the grant of some provision to both by the 
State. To conciliate the Church, measures were added for strengthen- 
ing its means of discipline, and for increasing the stipends of its 
poorer ministers. A commutation of tithes was to remove a constant 
source of quarrel in Ireland between the episcopal clergy and the 
people. The scheme w^as too large and statesmanlike to secure the 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH . 

France, 

1793- 
1815. 



Catholic 
Emanci- 
pation. 



794 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



immediate assent of the Cabinet, and before that assent could be won the 
plan was communicated through the treachery of the Chancellor, Lord 
Loughborough, to George the Third. " I count any man my personal 
enemy," the King broke out angrily to Dundas, " who proposes any 
such measure." Pitt answered this outburst by submitting his whole plan 
to the King. " The political circumstances under which the exclusive 
laws originated," he wrote, " arising either from the conflicting power 
of hostile and nearly balanced sects, from the apprehension of a Popish 
Queen as successor, a disputed succession and a foreign pretender, a 
division in Europe between Catholic and Protestant Powers, are no 
longer applicable to the present state of things." But argument was 
wasted upon George the Third. In spite of the decision of the lawyers 
whom he consulted, the King held himself bound by his Coronation 
Oath to maintain the tests ; and his bigotry agreed too well with the 
religious hatred and political distrust of the Catholics which still pre- 
vailed among the bulk of the English people not to make his decision 
fatal to the bill. Pitt however held firm to its principle ; he resigned 
in February 1801, and was succeeded by the Speaker of the House of 
Commons, Mr. Addington, a man as dull and bigoted as George 
himself. 

Hardly a single member of the Addington Ministry could be regarded 
as rising even to the second rank of political eminence, but their work 
was mainly one of peace. Although the debt had risen from 244 
millions to 520, the desire for peace sprang from no sense of national 
exhaustion. On the contrary, wealth had never increased so fast. 
Steam and canals, with the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton^, 
were producing their effect in a rapid development of trade and manu- 
factures, and commerce found fresh outlets in the colonies gained by 
the war ; for the union of Holland with the French Republic had been 
followed by the seizure of the Cape of Good Hope, of Ceylon, of Ma- 
lacca, and of the Dutch possessions in the Spice Islands. Nor was 
there any ground for despondency in the aspect of the war itself. 
The Treaty of Luneville, as we have seen, left England alone in the 
struggle against France ; while an armed neutrality of the Northern 
powers, with the Czar Peter of Russia at its head, revived the claim 
that a neutral flag should cover even contraband of war. But in 1800 
the surrender of Malta to the English fleet gave it the mastery of the 
Mediterranean ; and General Abercromby, landing with a small force 
in Aboukir Bay, defeated on the 21st of March, 1801, the French army 
that Buonaparte had left in Egypt, and which soon found itself, 
forced to surrender in the Convention of Cairo. By its evacuation of 
Egypt, India was secured and Turkey saved from sinking into a 
dependency of France. In April a British fleet appeared before Copen- 
hagen, and after a desperate struggle silenced the Danish batteries, 
captured the bulk of the Danish ships, and forced Denmark to with- 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND . 



795 



draw from the Northern Coalition, which was finally broken up by 
th^ death of the Czar. Both parties in this gigantic struggle however 
were at last anxious for peace. On the English side there was a 
general sense that the struggle with the Revolution was in fact at an 
end. Not only had England held its principles at bay, but the war 
had at last seated on the throne of France a military despot who 
hated the principles of the Revolution even more than England did. 
So far as France herself was concerned, the First Consul, Buonaparte, 
was eager at the moment for a peace which would enable him 
to establish his power and to crush the last sparks of freedom in 
the country of which he had made himself in reality the absolute 
master. 

After long negotiations the Peace of Amiens was concluded in 
March, 1802, on terms of mutual restitution. France promised 
to retire from Southern Italy, and to leave the new republics it had 
established in the countries along its border to themselves. England 
engaged to give up her newly conquered colonies save Ceylon, and to 
replace the Knights of St. John in the isle of Malta. " It is a peace 
which everybody is glad of and nobody is proud of," said a witty critic ; 
but there was a general sense of relief at the close of the long struggle, 
and the new French ambassador was drawn in triumph on his arrival 
through the streets of London. But the Peace brought no rest to 
Buonaparte's ambition. It was soon plain that England would have 
to bear the brunt of a new contest, but of a contest wholly different 
in kind from that which the Peace had put an end to. Whatever 
had been the errors of the French Revolutionists, even their worst 
attacks on the independence of the nations around them had been 
v^eiled by a vague notion of freeing the peoples whom they invaded 
from the yoke of their rulers. But the aim of Buonaparte was simply 
that of a vulgar conqueror. He was resolute to be master of 
the western world, and no notions of popular freedom or sense of 
national right ever interfered with his resolve. The means at his 
command were immense. The political life of the Revolution had 
been cut short by his mihtary despotism, but the new social vigour it 
had giyen to France through the abolition of privileges and the creation 
of a new middle class on the ruins of the clergy and the nobles still 
lived on. While the dissensions which tore France asunder were 
hushed by the policy of the First Consul, by his restoration of the 
Church as a religious power, his recall of the exiles, and the economy 
and wise administration which distinguished his rule, the centralized 
system of government bequeathed by the Monarchy to the Revolu- 
tion and by the Revolution to Buonaparte enabled him easily to seize 
this national vigour for the profit of his own despotism. The exhaus- 
tion of the brilliant hopes raised by the Revolution, the craving for 
public order, the military enthusiasm and the impulse of a new 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH 

France. 
1793- 
1816. 



Peace of 
Amiens. 



796 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



glory given by the wonderful victories France had won, made a 
Tyranny possible ; and in the hands of Buonaparte this tyranny was 
supported by a secret police, by the suppression of the press and 
of all freedom of opinion, and above all by the iron will and immense 
ability of the First Consul himself. Once chosen Consul for life, he 
felt himself secure at home, and turned restlessly to the work of 
outer aggression. The republics established on the borders of France 
were brought into mere dependence on his will. Piedmont and 
Parma were annexed to France; and a French army occupied 
Switzerland. The temperate protests of the English Government 
were answered by demands for the expulsion of the French exiles 
who had been living in England ever since the Revolution, and 
for its surrender of Malta, which was retained till some security 
could be devised against a fresh seizure of the island by the French 
fleet. It was plain that a struggle was inevitable ; and in May 
1803 the armaments preparing in the French ports hastened the formal 
declaration of war. 

Whatever differences might have parted Whig from Tory in the 
earlier war with the Revolution, all were at one in the war against the 
ambition of Buonaparte. England was now the one country where l| 
freedom in any sense remained alive. "Every other monument of Euro- 1 1 
pean liberty has perished,'' cried Sir James Mackintosh, one of the most 
eminent of the Whig leaders. " That ancient fabric which has been 
gradually raised by the wisdom and virtue of our forefathers still 
stands ; but it stands alone, and it stands among ruins ! " With the 
fall of England despotism would have been universal throughout Europe; 
and it was at England that Buonaparte resolved to strike the first blow 
in his career of conquest. " Fifteen millions of people,'' he said, in 
allusion to the disproportion between the population of England and 
France, " must give way to forty millions." His attempt to strike at the 
English power in India through the Mahrattas of the central provinces 
was foiled by their defeat at Assaye ; but an invasion of England itself 
was planned on a gigantic scale. A camp of one hundred thou- 
sand men was formed at Boulogne, and a host of flat-bottomed 
boats gathered for their conveyance across the Channel. The peril 
of the nation not only united all political parties but recalled Pitt 
to power. On the retirement of Addington in 1804, Pitt proposed 
to include Fox and the leading Whigs in his new Ministry, but 
he was foiled by the bigotry of the King; and the refusal of Lord 
Grenville and of Wyndham to take office without Fox, as well as the 
loss of his post at a later time by his ablest supporter, Dundas, left 
Pitt almost alone. His health was broken and his appearance was 
haggard and depressed ; but he faced difficulty and danger with the 
same courage as of old. The invasion seemed imminent when Napoleon, 
who had now assumed the title of Emperor, appeared in the camp at 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



797 



Boulogne. "Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours," he is 
reported to have said, " and we are masters of the world." A 
skilfully combined plan by which the British fleet would have been 
divided, while the whole French navy was concentrated in the 
Channel, was delayed by the death of the admiral destined to 
execute it. But an alliance with Spain placed the Spanish fleet at 
Napoieon^s disposal in 1805, and he formed afresh scheme for its union 
with that of France, the crushing of the squadron under Cornwallis 
which blocked the ports of the Channel before Admiral Nelson could 
come to its support, and a crossing of the vast armament thus 
protected to the English shore. Three hundred thousand volunteers 
mustered in England to meet the coming attack ; but Pitt trusted 
more to a new league which he had succeeded in forming on the Conti- 
nent itself. The annexation of Genoa by Napoleon aided him in this 
effort ; and Russia, Austria, and Sweden joined in an alliance to wrest 
Italy and the Low Countries from the grasp of the French Emperor. 
Napoleon meanwhile swept the sea in vain for a glimpse of the great 
armament whose assembly in the Channel he had so skilfully planned. 
Admiral Villeneuve, uniting the Spanish ships at Corunna with his own 
squadron from Toulon, drew Nelson in pursuit to the West Indies, 
and then suddenly returning to Cadiz hastened to unite with the 
French squadron at Brest and crush the English fleet in the Channel. 
But a headlong pursuit brought Nelson up with him ere the manoeuvre 
was complete, and the two fleets met on the 21st of October, 1805, 
off Cape Trafalgar. " England," ran Nelson^s famous signal, " expects 
every man to do his duty ; " and though he fell himself in the hour of 
victory, twenty French sail had struck their flag ere the day was 
done. " England has saved herself by her courage," Pitt said in what 
were destined to be his last public Avords : "she will save Eiirope 
by her example ! " But even before the victory of Trafalgar Napoleon 
had abandoned the dream of invading England to meet the coalition 
in his rear; and swinging round his forces on the Danube he forced 
an Austrian army to a shameful capitulation in Ulm three days before 
his final naval defeat. From Ulm he marched on Vienna, and crushed 
the combined armies of Austria and Russia in the battle of Austerlitz. 
^^ Austerlitz," Wilberforce v/rote in his diary, "killed Pitt." Though he 
was still but forty-seven, the hollow voice and wasted frame of the great 
Minister had long told that death was near; and the blow to his hopes 
proved fatal. " Roll up that map," he said, pointing to a map of Eurape 
which hung upon the wall ; " it will not be wanted these ten years ! " 
Once only he rallied from stupor; and those who bent over him caught 
a faint murmur of "My country ! How I leave my country !" On the 
23rd of January, 1806, he breathed his last; and was laid in West- 
minster Abbey in the grave of Chatham. " What grave," exclaimed 
Lord Wellesley, " contains such a father and such a son ! What 



Sec. IV. 
The WAi 

WITH 

France, 
1793- 
1815. 



798 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



Canning. 



"hi 

mi 

UrJ- : 



sepulchre embosoms the remains of so much human excellence andij 
glory!" ^ I 

So great was felt to be the loss that nothing but the union of parties, 
which Pitt had in vain desired during his lifetime, could fill up the gap 
left by his death. In the new Ministry Fox, with the small body o4 
popular Whigs who were bent on peace and internal reform, unitedfl 
with the aristocratic Whigs under Lord Grenville and with the Tories 
under Lord Sidmouth. All home questions, in fact, were subordinated 
to the need of saving Europe from the ambition of France, and in the 
resolve to save Europe Fox was as resolute as Pitt himself. His hopes 
of peace, indeed, were stronger ; but they were foiled by the evasive 
answer which Napoleon gave to his overtures, and by a new war 
which he undertook against Prussia, the one power which seemed able 
to resist the arms of France. By the fatal indecision of the Ministry 
Prussia was left unaided till it was too late to aid her ; and on the I4tj 
of October, 1806, the decisive victory of Jena laid North Germany at] 
Napoleon's feet. Death had saved Fox only a month before fromj 
witnessing the overthrow of his hopes ; and his loss weakened the 
Grenville Cabinet at the moment when one of its greatest errors 
opened a new and more desperate struggle with France. By a violent 
stretch of her rights as a combatant England declared the whole coast 
occupied by France and its allies, from Dantzig to Trieste, to be in a 
state of blockade. It was impossible to enforce such a "paper blockade," 
even by the immense force at her disposal ; and Napoleon seized on the 
opportunity to retaliate by the entire exclusion of British commerce from 
the Continent, an exclusion which he trusted would end the war by the 
ruin it would bring on the English manufacturers. Decrees issued 
from Berlin and Milan ordered the seizure of all British exports and of 
vessels which had touched at any British port. The result of these 
decrees would, he hoped, prove the ruin of the carrying trade of 
Britain, which would pass into the hands of neutrals and especially 
of the Americans ; and it was to prevent this result that the Grenville 
Ministry issued Orders in Council in January 1807 by which neutral 
vessels voyaging to coasts subject to the blockaa., dlready declared 
were compelled on pain of seizure to touch previously at some British 
port. The germs of a yet wider struggle lay in these Orders ; but the 
fall of the Grenville Ministry was due not so much to its reckless 
foreign policy as to its wise and generous policy at home. Its greatest 
work, the abolition of the Slave Trade in February, was done in the ^ 
teeth of a vigorous opposition from the Tories and the merchants of | 
Liverpool ; and the first indications of a desire to bring about CathoHc | 
Emancipation was met on the part of the King by the demand of a f 
pledge not to meddle with the question, atid by the dismissal of the | 
Ministry in March on their refusal to give' , 1 

The dismissal of the Grenville MkCI .ry broke up the union of J 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



799 



parties ; and from this time to the end of the war England was wholly 
governed by the Tories. The nominal head of the Ministry which 
succeeded that of Lord Grenville was the Duke of Portland ; its 
guiding spirit was the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, a young 
and devoted adherent of Pitt, whose brilHant rhetoric gave him power 
over the House of Commons, while the vigour and breadth of his 
mind gave a new energy and colour to the war. At no time had op- 
position to Napoleon seemed so hopeless. From Berlin the Emperor 
marched into the heart of Poland, and though checked in the winter 
by the Russian forces in the hard-fought battle of Eylau, his victory 
of Friedland brought the Czar Alexander in the summer of 1807 to 
consent to the Peace of Tilsit. From foes the two Emperors of the 
West and the East became friends, and the hope of French aid in the 
conquest of Turkey drew Alexander to a close alliance with Napoleon. 
Russia not only enforced the BerHn decrees against British commerce, 
but forced Sweden, the one ally which England still retained on the 
Continent, to renounce her alliance. The Russian and Swedish fleets 
were thus placed at the service of France, and the two Emperors 
counted on securing the fleet of Denmark, and threatening by this 
union the maritime supremacy which formed England^s real defence. 
The hope was foiled by the appearance off Elsinore in July 1807 of an 
expedition, promptly and secretly equipped by Canning, with a demand 
for the surrender of the Danish fleet into the hands of England, on 
pledge of its return at the close of the war. On the refusal of the 
Danes the dem.and was enforced by a bombardment of Copenhagen ; 
and the whole Danish fleet with a vast mass of naval stores were 
carried to British ports. But whatever Canning did to check France at 
sea, he could do nothing to arrest her progress on land. Napoleon was 
drunk with success. He was absolutely master of Western Europe, and 
its whole face changed as at an enchanter^s touch. Prussia was occupied 
by French troops. Holland was changed into a monarchy by a simple 
decree of the French Emperor, and its crown bestowed on his brother 
Louis. Another brother, Jerome, became King of Westphalia, a new 
realm built up ^utr of the Electorates of Hesse Cassel and Hanover. 
A third brother, Joseph, was made King of Naples ; while the rest of 
Italy, and even Rome itself, was annexed to the French Empire. 

As little opposition met Napoleon's first aggressions in the Peninsula. 
In the Treaty of Fontainebleau (Oct. 1807) France and Spain agreed 
to divide Portugal between them ; and the reigning House of Braganza 
fled helplessly from Lisbon to a refuge in Brazil. But the seizure of 
Portugal was only meant as a prelude to the seizure of Spain. 
Charles the Fourth, whom a riot in his capital had driven to abdication, 
and his son Ferdinand the Seventh were drawn to Bayonne in May 
1808 on pretext of an i vCrview with the Emperor, and forced to 
resign their claims to th^ "vanish crown, while the French army 



8oo 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



entered Madrid and proclaimed Joseph Buonaparte King of Spain. 
This infamous act of treachery was hardly completed when Spain rose 
as one man against the stranger ; and desperate as the effort of its 
people seemed, the news of the rising was welcomed throughout Eng- 
land with a burst of enthusiastic joy. " Hitherto," cried Sheridan, a 
leader of the Whig opposition, " Buonaparte has contended with 
princes without dignity, numbers without ardour, or peoples without 
patriotism. He has yet to learn what it is to combat a people who 
are animated by one spirit against him." Tory and Whig alike held 
that "never had so happy an opportunity existed for Britain to strike a 
bold stroke for the rescue of the world;" and Canning at once resolved 
to change the system of desultory descents on colonies and sugar 
islands for a vigorous warfare in the Peninsula. Supplies were sent 
to the Spanish insurgents with reckless profusion, and two small 
armies placed under the command of Sir John Moore and Sir Arthur 
Wellesley for service in the Peninsula. In July 1808 the surrender 
at Baylen of a French force which had invaded Andalusia gave the 
first shock to the power of Napoleon, and the blow was followed by 
one almost as severe. Landing at the Mondego with fifteen thousand 
men, Sir Arthur Wellesley drove the French army of Portugal from 
the field of Vimiera, and forced it to surrender in the Convention of 
Cintra on the 30th of August. In Spain itself the tide of success 
was soon roughly turned by the appearance of Napoleon with an 
army of two hundred thousand men ; and Moore, who had advanced 
from Lisbon to Salamanca to support the Spanish armies, found them 
crushed on the Ebro, and was forced to fall hastily back on the coast. 
His force saved its honour in a battle before Corunna on the i6th of 
January, 1809, which enabled it to embark in safety; but elsewhere 
all seemed lost. The whole of northern and central Spain was held 
by the French armies ; and even Zaragoza, which had once heroically 
repulsed them, submitted after a second desperate siege. 

The landing of the wreck of Moore's army and the news of 
the Spanish defeats turned the temper of England from the wildest 
hope to the deepest despair ; but Canning remained unmoved. On 
the day of the evacuation of Corunna he signed a treaty of alliance 
with the Spanish Junta at Cadiz ; and the English force at Lisbon, 
which had already prepared to leave Portugal, was reinforced with 
thirteen thousand fresh troops and placed under the command of 
Sir Arthur Wellesley. " Portugal," Wellesley wrote coolly, " may be 
defended against any force which the French can bring against it." 
At this critical moment the best of the French troops with the Emperor 
nimself were drawn from the Peninsula to the Danube ; for the Spanish 
rising had roused Austria as well as England to a renewal of the 
struggle. When Marshal Soult therefore threatened Lisbon from the 
north, Wellesley marched boldly against him, drove him from Oporto 



X. 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



8or 



in a disastrous retreat, and suddenly changing his line of operations 
pushed with twenty thousand men by Abrantes on Madrid. He was 
joined on the march by a Spanish force of thirty thousand nien ; and 
a bloody action of two days with a French army of equal force at 
Talavera on the 27th of July, 1809, restored the renown of English 
arms. The losses on both sides were enormous, and the French fell 
back at the close of the struggle ; but the fruits of the victory were 
lost by the sudden appearance of Soult on the English line of advance, 
and Wellesley was forced to retreat hastily on Badajoz. His failure 
was embittered by heavier disasters elsewhere. Austria was driven to 
sue for peace by Napoleon's victory at Wagram ; and a force of forty 
thousand English soldiers which had been despatched against Antwerp 
in July returned home baf3e,d after losing half its numbers in the 
marshes of Walcherpn. 

The failure at Walcheren brought about the fall of the Portland 
Ministry. Canning attributed the disaster to the incompetence of Lord 
Castlereagh, an Irish peer who after taking the chief part in bringing 
about the union between England and Ireland had been raised by the 
Duke of Portland to the post of Secretary at War ; and the quarrel 
between the two Ministers ended in a duel and in their resignation of 
their offices (^ept. 1809). The Duke of Portland retired ; and a new 
Ministry was formed out of the more Tory members of the late 
administration under the guidance of Spencer Perceval, an industrious 
mediocrity of the narrowest type ; the Marquis of Wellesley, a brother 
of the English general in Spain, becoming Foreign Secretary. But if 
Perceval and his colleagues possessed few of the higher qualities of 
statesmanship, they had one characteristic which in the actual posi- 
tion of English affairs was beyond all price. They were resolute to 
continue the war. In the nation at large the fit of enthusiasm had been 
followed by a fit of despair ; and the City of London even petitioned 
for a withdrawal of the English forces from the Peninsula. Napoleon 
seemed irresistible, and now that Austria v/as crushed and England 
stood alone in opposition to him, the Emperor resolved to put an end 
to the strife by a strict enforcement of the Continental System and a 
vigorous prosecution of the war in Spain. Andalusia, the one province 
which remained independent, was invaded in the opening of 1810, and 
with the exception of Cadiz reduced to 3ubmission. Marshal Massena 
with a fine army of eighty thousand men marched upon Lisbon. 
Even Perceval abandoned all hope of preserving a hold on the Penin- 
sula in face of these new effoi'ts, and threw on Wellesley, who had 
been raised to the peerage as Lord Wellington after Talavera, the re- 
sponsibility of resolving to remain there. But the cool judgment and 
firm temper which distinguished Wellington enabled him to face a re- 
sponsibility from vrhich weaker men would have shrunk. " I conceive,'^ 
tie answered, " that the honour and interest of our country require that 
3 F 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH 

France, 
1793- 
1815. 



TOT3'PR 



802 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



we should hold our ground here as long as possible ; and, please God 
I will maintain it as long as I can." By the addition of Portuguese 
troops who had been trained under British officers, his army was novs 
raised to fifty thousand men ; and though his inferiority in force com- 
pelled him to look on while Massena reduced the frontier fortresse; 
of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, he inflicted on him a heavy check a 
the heights of Busaco, and finally fell back in October 1810 on three 
lines of defence which he had secretly constructed at Torres Vedras 
along a chain of mountain heights crowned with redoubts and bristling 
with cannon. The position was impregnable ; and able and stubbon 
as Massena was he found himself forced after a month^s fruitlesi 
efforts to fall back in a masterly retreat ; but so terrible were th( 
privations of the French army in passing again through the wastec 
country that it was only with forty thousand men that he reachec 
Ciudad Rodrigo in the spring of 181 1. Reinforced by fresh troops 
Massena turned fiercely to the relief of Almeida, which Wellington 
had besieged ; but 2 days' bloody and obstinate fighting on the 5th of 
May, 181 1, failed to drive the English army from its position ail 
Fuentes d'Onoro, and the Marshal fell back on Salamanca and relinf | 
quished his effort to drive WelHngton from Portugal. 

Great as was the effect of Torres Vedras in restoring the spirit of 
the English people and in reviving throughout Europe the hope of 
resistance to the tyranny of Napoleon, its immediate result was little 
save the deliverance of Portugal. The French remained masters of 
all Spain save Cadiz and the eastern provinces, and even the east 
coast was reduced in 181 1 by the vigour of General Suchet. An 
attempt of Wellington to retake Badajoz was foiled by the co-operation . 
of the army of the South under Marshal Soult with that of the Nortl|( 
under Marshal Marmont ; and a fruitless attack on Almeida wasted ^ 
the rest of the year. Not only was the French hold on Spain too 
strong to be shaken by the force at WeUington's disposal, but the 
Continental System of Napoleon was beginning to involve England in 
dangers which he was far from having foreseen. His effort to exclude 
English exports from the Continent had been foiled by the rise of a 
vast system of contraband trade, by the evasions practised in the 
Prussian and Russian ports, and by the rapid development of the 
carrying trade under neutral flags. The French army itself was clad 
in great coats made at Leeds, and shod with shoes from Northampton. 
But if Napoleon's direct blow at England had failed to bring about any 
serious results, the Orders in Council with which the Grenville Ministry 
had attempted to prevent the transfer of the carrying trade from 
English to neutral ships, by compelling all vessels on their way to 
ports under blockade to touch at British harbours, had at once created 
serious embarrassments with America. A year after the issue of these 
Orders America replied to both combatants by a N on- Intercourse Act 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



803 



'March 1808), which suspended all trade between either France or 
England and the United States. Napoleon adroitly met this measure 
by an offer to w^ithdraw the restrictions he had imposed on neutral 
trade if America compelled England lo show equal respect to her 
flag ; but no concession could be obtained from the Perceval Cabinet. 
The quarrel between the two countries was embittered by the asser- 
tion on England^s side of a " right of search/' which compelled 
American vessels to surrender any British subjects who formed part of 
their crew and who were claimed as deserters from the English navy. 
In 181 1 Napoleon fulfilled his pledge of removing all obstacles to 
American trade, and America repealed the Non-Intercourse Act as 
far as it related to France. But no corresponding concession could 
be wrung from the English Government ; though the closing of the 
American ports inflicted a heavier blow on British commerce than 
any which the Orders could have aimed at preventing. During 181 1 
indeed English exports were reduced by one-third of their whole 
amount. In America the irritation at last brought about a cry for war 
which, in spite of the resolute opposition of the New England States, 
forced Congress to raise an army of twenty-five thousand men, and to 
declare the impressment of seamen sailing under an American flag to 
be piracy. England at last consented to withdraw her Orders in 
Council, but the concession was made too late to avert a declaration 
of war on the part of the United States in June, 1812. 

The moment when America entered into the great struggle was a 
critical moment in the history of mankind. Six days after President 
Madison issued his declaration of war, Napoleon crossed the Niemen 
on his march to Moscow. Successful as his Continental System had 
been in stirring up war between England and America, it had been no 
less successful in breaking the alliance which he had made with the 
Emperor Alexander at Tilsit and in forcing on a contest with Russia 
which was destined to be a fatal one. On the one hand. Napoleon 
was irritated by the refusal of Russia to enforce strictly the suspension 
of all trade with England, though such a suspension would have ruined 
the Russian landowners. On the other, the Czar saw with growing 
anxiety the advance of the French Empire which sprang from 
Napoleon's resolve to enforce his system by a seizure of the northern 
coasts. In 181 1 Holland, the Hanseatic towns, part of Westphalia, and 
the Duchy of Oldenburg were successively annexed, and the Duchy 
of Mecklenburg threatened with seizure. A peremptory demand 
on the part of France for the entire cessation of intercourse with 
England brought the quarrel to a head ; and preparations were made 
on both sides for a gigantic struggle. The best of the French soldiers 
were drawn from Spain to the frontier of Poland; and Wellington, 
whose army had been raised to a force of forty thousand Englishmen 
and twenty thousand Portuguese, profited by the withdrawal to throw 

3 F 2 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH 

France, 
1793- 
1815. 



Salaman- 
ca and 
Moscow. 



8o4 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



off his system of defence and to assume an attitudb of attack. Ciudad 
Rodrigo and Badajoz were taken hy storm during the spring of 1812 ; 
and three days before Napoleon crossed the Niemeji (June 24) in his 
march on Moscow, WeHington crossed the Agueda in a march on 
Salamanca. After a series of .masterly movements on both sides, 
Marmont with the French army of the North attacked -the English 
on the hills in the neighbourhood of that town (July 22). While 
marching round the right of the English position, the French left wing 
was left isolated ; and with a sudden exclamation of *' Marmont is 
lost ! " Wellijagton flung on it the bulk of his force, crushed it, and drove] 
the whole army froin the field. The loss on either side was nearly 
equal, but failure had demorali;zed the French army ; and its retreat 
forced Joseph to leave Madrid, and Soult to evacuate Andalusia and" 
to concentrate the southern army on the eastern coast. While 
Napoleon was stjll pushing slowly oyer the vast plains pf Poland, 
Wellington made his entry intp Madrid in August, and began the 
siege of Burgos. The town hpwever held out gallantly for a month, 
till the advance pf the two French armies, now concentrated in the. 
north and south of Spain, forced We,llington (Oct. 18) to a hasty 
retreat on the Portuguese frontier. A day later (Oct. 19) began the 
more fatal retreat of the Grand Arcny from Moscow. Victorious in 
the battle of Borodino, Napoleon had entered the older capital of 
Russiaintriumph, and v/aited impatiently to receive proposals of peace 
from the Cz^, wheii a fire kindled by its own inhabitants reduced the 
city to ashes. The French army was forced to fall back amidst the 
horrors pf a Russian winter. Of the four hundred thousand combatants 
who formed the Grand Army at its first outset, only a few thousand 
recrossed the Niemen in December. 

Gallantly as Napoleon was still to struggle against the foes who 
sprang up around him, his ruin l;>ecame certain from the hour when he 
fell back from Moscow. B,ut a new English Ministry reaped the glory 
of success in the long struggle with his ambition. A return of the 
King's rnadness had made it necessary in the beginning of 181 1 to 
confer the Regency by Act of Parliament on the Prince of Wales ; and 
the Whig sympathies of the Prince threatened the Perceval Cabinet 
with dismissal. The insecurity of their position told on the conduct 
of the war; for much of WeUington's apparent inactivity during 181 1 
was really due to the hesitation and timidity of the Ministers at 
home. In March 181 2 the assassination of Perceval by a maniac 
named Bellingham brought about the fall of his Ministry and fresh 
efforts to install the Whigs in office. But the attempt was as fruitless 
as ever, and the old Ministry was restored under the guidance of 
the Earl of Liverpool, a man of no great abilities, but temperate, well 
informed, and endowed with a singular gift of holding discordant 
colleagues together. But the death of Perceval marks more than a 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



805 



mere change of Ministry. From that moment the developement of 
English life, which had b^een roughly arrested in 1792 by the reaction 
against the French Revolution, began again to take its natural course. 
The anti-revolutionaiy terror which Burke did so much to rouse had 
spent most of its force by the time of the Peace of Amiens ; and 
though the country was unanimous in the after-struggle against the 
ambition of Buonaparte, the social distress which followed on the 
renewal of the war revived questions of internal reform which had 
been set a:side ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution as 
Jacobinical; The natural relation of trade and commerce to the 
general wealth of the people at large was disturbed by the peculiar 
circumstances of the time. The war enriched the landowner, the 
capitalist, the manufacturer, the farmer ; but it impoverished the poor. 
It is indeed from the fatal years v/hich lie between the Peace of Amiens 
and Waterloo that we must date that war of classes, that social 
severance between rich and poor, between employers and em.ployed, 
which still forms the great difficulty of English politics. 

The increase of wealth was indeed enormous. England was sole 
mistress of the seas. The war had given her possession of the colonies 
of Spain, of Holland, and of France ; and if her trade was checked 
for a time by the Berlin decrees, the efforts of Napoleon were soon 
rendered fruitless by the vast smuggling system which sprang up along 
the coast of North Germany. In spite of the far more serious blow 
which commerce received from the quarrel with America, English 
exports nearly doubled in the last fifteen years of the war. Manufac- 
tures profited by the great discoveries of Watt and Arkwright ; 
and the consumption of raw cotton in the mills of Lancashire, rose 
during the same period from fifty to a hundred millions of pounds. 
The vast accumulation of capital, as well as the constant recurrence of 
bad seasons at this time, told upon the land, and forced agriculture into 
a feverish and unhealthy prosperity. Wheat rose to famine prices, and 
the value of land rose in proportion with the price of wheat. Inclosures 
went on with prodigious rapidity ; the income of every landowner was 
doubled, while the farmers wxre able to introduce improvements into 
the processes of agriculture which changed the whole face of the country. 
But if the increase of wealth was enormous, its distribution was partial. 
During the fifteen years which preceded Waterloo, the number of the 
population rose from ten to thirteen millions, and this rapid increase 
kept down the rate of wages, which would naturally have advanced in 
a corresponding degree with the increase in the national wealth. Even 
manufactures, though destined in the long run to benefit the labouring- 
classes, seemed at first rather to depress them. One of the earliest 
results of the introduction of machinery was the ruin of a number of 
small trades which were carried on at home, and the pauperization of 
families who rehed on them for support. In the winter of ;8ii the ter- 



Sec. IV. 
Thf. War 

WITH 

Franck. 
1793- 
1815. 



The State 

of the 
Country. 



8o6 



fflSlVRY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



[Chap. 



rible pressure of this transition from handicraft to machinery was seen 
in the Luddite, or machine-breaking, riots which broke out over the 
northern and midland counties ; and which were only suppressed by 
military force. While labour was thus thrown out of its older grooves, 
and the rate of wages kept down at an artificially low figure by the 
rapid increase of population, the rise in the price of wheat, which brought 
wealth to the landowner and the farmer, brought famine and death to 
the poor, for England was cut off by the war from the vast corn-fields 
of the Continent or of America, which now-a-days redress from their 
abundance the results of a bad harvest. Scarcity was followed by a 
terrible pauperization of the labouring classes. The amount of the 
poor-rate rose fifty per cent ; and with the increase of poverty followed 
its inevitable result, the increase of crime. 

The sense both of national glory and of national suffering told, 
however feebly, on the course of politics at home. Under the Perceval 
Ministry a blind opposition had been offered by the Government to 
every project of change or reform : but the terror-struck reaction 
against the French Revolution which this opposition strove to perpetuate 
was even then passing away. The publication of the Edinburgh 
Review in 1802 by a knot of young lawyers at Edinburgh, (Brougham, 
Jeffrey, Horner, and Mackintosh,) marked the revival of the policy of 
constitutional and administrative progress which had been reluctantly 
abandoned by William Pitt. Jeremy Bentham gave a new vigour to 
political speculation by his advocacy of the doctrine of Utility, and 
his definition of " the greatest happiness of the greatest number " as the 
aim of political action. In 1809 Sir Francis Burdett revived the 
question of Parliamentary Reform. Only fifteen members supported 
his motion ; and a reference to the House of Commons, in a pamphlet 
which he subsequently published, as " a part of our fellow-subjects 
collected together by means which it is not necessary to describe " was 
met by his committal to the Tower, where he remained till the proro- 
gation of the Parliament. A far greater effect was produced by the 
perseverance with which Canning pressed year by year the question of 
Catholic Emancipation. So long as Perceval lived both efforts at 
Reform were equally vain ; but on the accession of Lord Liverpool to 
power the advancing strength of a more liberal sentiment in the nation 
was felt by the policy of " moderate concession " which was adopted by 
the new Ministry. Catholic Emancipation became an open question 
in the Cabinet itself, and was adopted in 18 12 by a triumphant ma- 
jority in the House of Commons, though still rejected by the Lords. 

From this moment, however, all questions of home politics were again 
thrown into the background by the absorbing interest of the war. In 
spite of the gigantic efforts which Napoleon made to repair the loss of 
the Grand Army, the spell which he had cast over Europe was broken 
by the retreat from Moscow. Prussia rose against him as the Russian 



X.1 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



S07 



army advanced across the Niemen, and the French were at once 
thrown back on the Elbe. In May 1813 WelHngton again left 
Portugal with an army which had now risen to ninety thousand men ; 
and overtaking the French forces in retreat at Vittoria inflicted on 
them a defeat (June 21) which drove them in utter rout across the 
Pyrenees. Madrid was at once evacuated ; and Clauzel fell back from 
Zaragoza into France. The victory not only freed Spain from its inva- 
ders ; it restored the spirit of the Allies at the darkest hour of their new 
fortunes. The genius of Napoleon rose to its height in his last cam- 
paigns. With a fresh army of two hundred thousand men whom he 
had gathered at Mainz he marched on the allied armies of Russia a^nd 
Prussia in May, cleared Saxony by a victory over them at Lutzen, and 
threw them back on the Oder by a fresh victory at Bautzen. Dis- 
heartened by defeat, and by the neutral attitude which Austria still 
preserved, the two powers consented, in June to an armistice, and 
negotiated for peace ; but the loss of Spain and Wellington's advance 
on the Pyrenees gave a new vigour to their counsels. The close of 
the armistice was followed by the union of Austria with the Allied 
Powers ; and a terrible overthrow of Napoleon at Leipzig in October 
forced the French army to cross the Rhine. Meanwhile the sieges 
of San Sebastian and of Pampeluna, with the obstinate defence of 
Maishal Soult in the Pyrenees, held Wellington for a time at bay ; 
and it was only in October that a victory on the Bidassoa enabled him 
to enter France and to force Soult from his entrenched camp before 
Bayonne. But the war was now hurrying to its close. On the last day 
of 181 3 the alHes crossed the Rhine, and in a month a third of France 
had passed without opposition into their hands. Soult, again defeated 
by Wellington at Orthez, fell back on Toulouse : and Bordeaux, then 
left uncovered, hardly waited the arrival of the English forces to 
hoist the white flag of the Bourbons. On the loth of April, 18 14, 
Wellington again attacked Soult at Toulouse in an obstinate and 
indecisive engagement ; but though neither general knew it, the war 
was at that moment at an end. The wonderful struggle which Napoleon 
with a handful of men had maintained for two months against the over- 
whelming forces of the Allies closed with the surrender of Paris on the 
31st of March ; and the submission of the capital was at once followed 
by the abdication of the Emperor and the return of the Bourbons. 

England's triumph over its great enemy was dashed by the more 
doubtful fortunes of the struggle which Napoleon had kindled across 
the Atlantic. The declaration of war by America in June 18 12 seemed 
an act of sheer madness. . The American navy consisted of a few 
frigates and sloops ; its army was a mass of half-drilled and half- 
armed recruits ; the States themselves were divided on the question of 
the war ; and Connecticut with Massachusetts refused to send either 
money or men. Three attempts to penetrate into Canada during the 



Sec. IV. 
The War 

WITH 

France. 
1793- 
1815, 



The 

American 

V/ar. 



8o8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



summer and autumn were repulsed with heavy loss. But these failures 
were more th^n Redeemed by unexpected successes at seal In two 
successive eng^agemetits between English and American frigates, the 
former were forced to strike their flag. The effect of these victories 
was out of all pf^roportion to their real importance ; for they were the 
first heavy blows which had been dealt at England's supremacy over 
the seas. In 1813 America followed up its naval triumphs by more 
vigorous efforts on land. Its forces cleared Lake Ontario, captured 
Toronto, destroyed the British flotilla on Lake Erie, and made 
themselves masters of Upper Cailada. An attack on Lower Canada, 
however, was successftilly beaten back ; and a fresh advance of 
the British and Canadian forces in the heart of the winter again 
recovered the Upper Province. The reverse gave fresh strength 
to the party in the United States which had throughout been opposed 
to the war, arid whose opposition to it had been embittered by the 
terrible distress brought about by the blockade and the ruin of 
American commerce. Cries of secession began to be heard, and 
Massachusetts took the bold step of appointing delegates to confer 
with delegates from the other New England States " on the subject of 
their grievarices and common concerns." In 18 14, however, the war 
was renewed with more vigour than ever. Upper Canada was again 
invaded, but the American army, after inflicting a severe defeat on 
the British forces in the battle of Chippewa in July, was itself defeated 
a few weeks after in an equally stubborn engagement, and thrown back 
on its owti frontier. The fall of Napoleon now enabled the English 
Government to devote its whole strength to the struggle with an enemy 
which it had at last ceased to despise. General Rose, with a force of 
four thousand men, appeared in the Potomac, captured Washington, 
and before evacuating the city burnt its public buildings to the ground. 
Few more shameful acts are recorded in our history ; and it was the 
more shameful in that it was done under strict orders from the 
Government at home. The raid upon Washington, however, was inten- 
ded simply to strike terror into the American people ; and the real stress 
of the war was thrown on two expeditions whose business was to pene- 
trate into the States from the north and from the south. Both 
proved titter failures. A force of nine thousand Peninsular veterans 
which marched in September to the attack of Plattsburg on Lake 
Champlain' was forced to fall back by the defeat of the English flotilla 
which accompanied it. A second force under General Packenham 
appeared iri December at the mouth of the Mississippi and attacked 
New Orleans, but was repulsed by General Jackson with the loss of 
half its numbers. Peace, however, had already been concluded. The 
close of the French war removed the causes of the struggle, and the 
claims, whether of the English or of the Americans, were set aside in 
silence in the new treaty of 1814, 



f 



!1 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND, 



809 



The close of the war with America freed England's hands at a 
moment when the reappearance of Napoleon at Paris called her to a 
new and final struggle with France. By treaty with the AlUed Powers 
Napoleon had been suffered to retain a fragment of his former empire 
— the island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany ; and from Elba he had 
looked on at the quarrels which sprang up between his' conquerors as 
soon as they gathered at Vienna to complete the settlement of Europe. 
The most formidable of these quarrels arose from the claim of Prussia 
to annex Saxony and that of Russia to annex Poland ; but their union 
for this purpose was met by a counter-league of England and Austria 
with their old enemy, France, whose ambassador, Talleyrand, laboured 
vigorously to bring the question to an issue by force of arms. At the 
moment, however, when a war between the two leagues s'eemed close 
at hand, Napoleon quitted Elba, landed on the ist March, 181 5, on 
the coast near Cannes, and, followed only by a thousand of his 
guards, marched over the mountains of Dauphin^ upon Grenoble and 
Lyons. He counted, and counted justly, on the indifference of the 
country to its new Bourbon nilers. on the longing of the army for 
a fresh struggle which should restore its glory, and abv^ve all in the 
spell of his name over soldiers whom he had so often led to victory. 
In twenty days from his landing he reached the Tuileries unopposed, 
while Lewis the Eighteenth fled helplessly to Ghent. But whatever 
hopes he had drawn from the divisions of the Allied Powers were at 
once dispelled by their resolute action on the news of his descent upon 
France. Their strife was hushed and their old union restored by the 
consciousness of a common danger. A Declaration adopted instantly 
by all put Napoleon to the ban of Europe. " In breaking the conven- 
tion which had established him in the island of Elba, Buonaparte has 
destroyed the sole legal title to which his political existence is attached. 
By reappearing in France with projects of trouble and overthrow he 
has not less deprived himself of the protection of the laws, and made 
it evident in the face of the itniverse that there can no longer be either 
peace or truce with him. The Powers, therefore, declare that Buona- 
parte has placed himself out of the pale of civil and social relations^ 
and that as the general enemy and disturber of the world he is aban- 
doned to public justice." An engagement to supply a million of men- 
for the purposes of the war, and a retail of their armies to the Rhine, 
gave practical effect to the words of the Allies. England furnished 
subsidies to the amount of eleven millions to support these enormous 
hosts, and hastened to place an army on the frontier of the Netherlands. 
The best troops of the force which had been employed in the Peninsula, 
however, were still across the Atlantic ; and of the eighty thousand 
men who gathered round Wellington only about a half were English- 
men, the rest principally raw levies from Belgium and Hanover. The 
Duke's plan was to unite with the one hundred and fifty thousand 



Sec. IV. 

ThK WAJt 

WITH 

France. 
1793- 
1815. 

Return of 
Napoleoii, 



8io 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



[Chap. 



Prussians under Marshal Blucher who were advancing on the Lower 
Rhine, and to enter France by Mons and Namur while the forces of 
Austria and Russia closed in upon Paris by way of Belfort and Elsass. 
But Napoleon had thrown aside all thought of a merely defensive war. 
By amazing efforts he had raised an army of two hundred and fifty 
thousand men in the few months since his arrival in Paris ; and in the 
opening of June one hundred and twenty thousand Frenchmen were con- 
centrated on the Sambre at Charleroi, while Wellington's troops still 
lay in cantonments on the line of the Scheldt from Ath to Nivelles, 
and Blucher's on that of the Meuse from Nivelles to Liege. Both the 
allied armies hastened to unite at Quatre Bras ; but their junction was 
already impossible. Blucher with eighty thousand men was himself 
attacked on the i6th by Napoleon at Ligny, and after a desperate con- 
test driven back with terrible loss upon Wavre. On the same day Ney 
with twenty thousand men, and an equal force under D'Erlon in 
reserve, appeared before Quatre Bras, where as yet only ten thousand 
English and the same force of Belgian troops had been able to 
assemble. The Belgians broke before the charges of the French 
horse ; but the dogged resistance of the English infantry gave time 
for Wellington to bring up corps after corps, till at the close of the day 
Ney saw himself heavily outnumbered, and withdrew baffled from the 
field. About five thousand men had fallen on either side in this fierce 
engagement : but heavy as was Wellington's loss, the firmness of the 
English army had already done much to foil Napoleon's effort at 
breaking through the line of the Allies. Blucher's retreat, however, 
left the English flank uncovered ; and on the following day, while the 
Prussians were falling back on Wavre, Wellington with nearly seventy 
thousand men — for his army was now well in hand — withdrew in good 
order upon Waterloo, followed by the mass of the French forces under 
the Emperor himself. Napoleon had detached Marshal Grouchy with 
thirty thousand men to hang upon the rear of the beaten Prussians, 
while with a force of eighty thousand men he resolved to bring Welling- 
ton to battle. On the morning of the i8th of June the two armies faced 
one another on the field of Waterloo in front of the forest of Soignies, 
on the high road to Brussels. Napoleon's one fear had been that of 
a continued retreat. " I have them ! " he cried, as he saw the English 
line drawn up on a low rise of ground which stretched across the high 
road from the chateau of Hougomont on its right to the farm and 
straggling village of La Haye Sainte on its left. He had some grounds 
for his confidence of success. On either side the forces numbered 
between seventy and eighty thousand men : but the French were superioi: 
in guns and cavalry, and a large part of Wellington's force consisted 
of Belgian levies who broke and fled at the outset of the fight. A 
fierce attack upon Hougomont opened the battle at eleven ; but it was 
not till midday that the corps of D'Erlon advanced upon the centre 



X.] 



MODERN ENGLAND. 



8ii 



near La Haye Sainte, which from that time bore the main brunt of the 
struggle. Never has greater courage, whether of attack or endurance, 
been shown on any field than was shown by both combatants at 
Waterloo. The columns of D'Erlon, repulsed by the English foot, were 
hurled back in disorder by a charge of the Scots Greys ; but the 
victorious horsemen were crushed in their turn by the French cuiras- 
siers, and the mass of the French cavalry, twelve thousand strong, 
flung itself in charge after charge on the English front, carrying the 
Enghsh guns and sweeping with desperate bravery round the unbroken 
squares whose fire thinned their ranks. With almost equal bravery 
the French columns of the centre again advanced, wrested at last the 
farm of La Haye Sainte from their opponents, and pushed on vigorously 
though in vain under Ney against the troops in its rear. Terrible as 
was the English loss — and many of his regiments were reduced to a 
mere handful of men — Wellington stubbornly held his ground while 
the Prussians, advancing, as they promised, from Wavre through deep 
and miry forest roads, were slowly gathering to his support, disregard- 
ing the attack on their rear by which Grouchy strove to hold them 
back from the field. At half-past four their advanced guard deployed 
at last from the woods ; but the main body was still far behind, and 
Napoleon was still able to hold his ground against them till their 
increasing masses forced him to stake all on a desperate effort against 
the English front. The Imperial Guard — his only reserve, and which 
had as yet taken no part in the battle — was drawn up at seven in 
two huge columns of attack. The first, wdth Ney himself at its head, 
swept all before it as it mounted the rise beside La Haye Sainte, on 
which the thin English line still held its ground, and all but touched 
the English front when its mass, torn by the terrible fire of musketr}^ 
with which it was received, gave way before a charge from the English 
Guards. The second, three thousand strong, advanced with the same 
courage over the slope near Hougomont, only to be shattered and 
repulsed in the same way. At the moment when these masses, shattered 
but still unconquered, fell slowly and doggedly back down the fatal 
rise, the Prussians pushed forward some forty thousand strong on 
Napoleon's right, their guns swxpt the road to Charleroi, and Welling- 
ton seized the moment for a general advance. From that moment all 
was lost. Only the Old Guard stood firm in the wreck of the French 
army ; and nothing but night and exhaustion checked the Enghsh in 
their pursuit of the broken masses who hurried from the field. The 
Prussian horse continued the chase through the night, and only forty 
thousand Frenchmen with some thirty guns recrossed the Sambre. 
Napoleon himself fled hurriedly to Paris, and his second abdication 
was followed by the triumphant entry of the English and Prussian 
armies into the French capital. 



812 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



EPILOGUE. 

With the victory of Waterloo we reach a tiihe within the memory of 
some now Hving, and the opening of a period of our history, the 
greatest indeed of all in real importance and interest, but perhaps 
too near to us as yet lo admit of a c6ol and purely historical 
treatment. In a work such as the present at any rate it will be advis- 
able to limit ourselves from this point to a brief summary of the more 
noteworthy events which have occurred in our political history since 
1815. 

Tlie peace which closed the great war with Napoleon left Britain 
feverish and exhausted. Of her conquests at sea she retained only 
Malta, (whose former possessors, the Knights of St. John, had ceased 
to exist,) the Dutch colonies of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, 
the French colony of Mauritius, and a few West India islands. On 
the other hand the pressure of the heavy taxation and of the debt, 
which now reached eight hundred millions, was embittered by the 
general distress of the country. The rapid development of English 
industry for a time ran ahead of the world^s demands ; the markers at 
home and abroad were glutted with unsaleable goods, and mills and 
manufactories were brought to a standstill. The scarcity caused by a 
series of bad harvests was intensified by the selfish legislation of the 
landowners in Parliament. Conscious that the prosperity of English 
agriculture was merely factitious, and rested on the high price of corn 
produced by the war, they prohibited by ail Act passed in 1815- the 
introduction of foreign corn till wheat had reached famine prices. 
Society, too, was disturbed by the great changes of employment con- 
sequent on a sudden return to peace after twenty years of war,' and 
by the disbanding^ of the immense forces employed at sea and on land. 
The movement against machinery which had been put down in 1812 
revived in the formidable riots of the Luddites, and the distress of the 
rural poor brought about a rapid increase of crime. The steady 
opposition too of the Administration, in v/hich Lord Castlereagh's 
influence was now supreme, to any project of political'progress created 
a dangerous irritation which brought to the front men whose demand 
of a " radical reform " in EngHsh institutions won them the name of 
I Radicals, and drove more violent agitators into treasonable disaffection 



EPILOGUE, 



813 



and silly plots. In 1819 the breaking up by militar}^ force of a meeting 
at Manchester, assembled for the purpose of advocating a reform in 
Parliament, increased the unpopularity of the Government ; and a 
plot of some desperate men with Arthur Thistlewood at their head for 
the assassination of the whole Ministry, which is known a.s tlie Cato- 
Street Conspiracy (1820), threw light on the violent temper which was 
springing up among its more extreme opponents. The death of 
.George the Third in 1820, and the accession of his son the Prince 
Regent as George the Fourth, only added to the general disturba^nce 
of men's ipinds. The new King had long since forsaken his wife and 
privately charged her with infideKty ; his first act on mounting the 
throne was to renew his accusations against her, and to lay before 
Parliament a bill for the dissolution of her marriage with him. The 
public agitation which followed on this step at last forced the Ministry 
to abandon the bill, but tlie shame of the royal family and the 
unpopularity of the King increased the general discontent of the 
country. 

The real danger to public order, however, lay only in the blind oppo- 
sition to all political change which confused wise and moderate projects 
of reform with projects of revolution; and in 1822 the suicide of 
Lord Castlereagh, who had now become Marquis of Londonderry, 
and to whom this opposition was mainly due, put an end to the 
policy of mere resistance. Canning became Foreign Secretary in 
Castlereagh's place, and with Canning returned the earlier and progres- 
sive policy of William Pitt. Abroad, his first act was to break with 
the "Holy Alliance," as it called itself, which the continental courts 
had formed after the overthrow of Napoleon for the repression of 
revolutionary or liberal movements in their kingdoms, and whose 
despotic policy had (driven Naples, Spain, and Portugal in 1820 into 
revolt. Canning asserted the principle of non-interference in the internal 
affairs of foreign states, a principle he enforced by sending troops in 
1826 to defend Portugal from Spanish intervention, while he recognized 
the revolted colonies of Spain in South America and Mexico as indepen- 
dent states. At home his influence was seen in the new strength gained 
by the question of Catholic Emancipation, and in the passing of a bill 
for giving relief to Roman Catholics through the House of Commons 
in 1825. With the entry of his friend Mr. Huskissoii into office in 1823 
began a commercial policy which was founded on a conviction of 
the benefits derived from freedom of trade, and which brought about 
at a later time the repeal of the Corn Laws. The new drift of public 
policy produced a division among the Ministers which showed itself 
openly at Lord Liverpool's death in 1827. Canning became First Lord 
of the Treasury, but the Duke of Wellington, with the Chancellor, Lord 
Eldon, and the Home Secretaiy, Mr. Peel, refused to serve under him ; 
and four months after the formation of Canning's Ministry it was 



HISTORY OP THE EXGLISH PEOPLE, 



Epilcjve broken up by his death. A tempcran- Ministn- formed under Lord 
1815- Goderich on Canning's principles was at once weakened by the position 

1873. oi foreign affairs. A revolt of the Greeks against Turkey had now 
lasted some years in spite of Canning's efforts to bring about peace, 
and the despatch of an Eg^-ptian expedition with orders to devastate 
the Morea and cany oft its inhabitants as slaves forced England, 
France, and Russia to interfere. In 1827 their united fleet under Admiral 
Codrington attacked and destroyed that of Eg}^t in the bay of 
Xavarino ; but the blow at Turkey was disapproved by English opinion, 
and :lie Ministry-, already wanting in Parliamentaiy strength, was driven 
to resign (1828). 

Reform. The fonnation of a purely Tory ^vlinistry by the Duke of Wellington, 
with Mr. Peel for its principal support in the Commons, was generally 
I looked on as a promise of utter resistance to all further progress. But 
, the state of Ireland, where a " Catholic Association" formed by Daniel 
' O'Connell maintained a growing agitation, had now reached a point 
when the English Ministr}- had to choose between concession and civil 
war. The Duke gave way, and brought in a bill which, hke that 
designed by Pitt, admitted Roman Catholics to Parliament, and to all 
but a few of the highest posts, ci\"il or militar)', in the service of the 
CroTSTL. The passing of this bill in 1829 by the aid of the Whigs threw 
the Ton- pait}- into confusion ; while the cry for Parliamentary Reform 
was suddenly re^-ived with a strength it had never known before by a 
Revolution in France in 1830, which drove Charles the Tenth from the 
throne and called his cousin, Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, to 
reign as a Constitutional King. William the Fourth, who succeeded 
to the cro^TL on the death of his brother, George the Fourth, at this 
moment (1830) was favourable to the demand of Reform, but Welling- 
ton refused all concession. The refusal drove him from office ; and 
for the first time after twent}- years the Whigs saw themselves again 
in power under the leadership of Earl Grey. A bill for Parlia- 
mentary^ Reform, which took away the right of representation from 
fifh'-six decayed or rotten boroughs, gave the 143 members they 
returned to counties or large to^-ns which as yet sent no mem- 
bers to Parliament, estabhshed a £10 householder qualification 
' for voters in boroughs, and extended the county franchise to lease- 
; holders and copyholders, was laid before Parhament in 183 1. On 
its defeat the Ministty appealed to the country-. The new House of 
! Commons at once passed the bill, and so terrible was the agitation pro- 
\ duced by its rejection by the Lords, that on its subsequent reintroduc- 
' tion the' Peers who opposed it ^vithdrew and suffered it to become 
'law (June 7, 1832}. The Reformed Parhament which met in 1833 did 
much by the \-iolence and inexperience of many of its new members, 
and especially by the conduct of O'Connell, to produce a feeling of 
'reaction in the countr)-. On the resignation of Lord Grey in 1834 the 



EPILOGUE. 



Ministry was reconstituted under the leadership of Viscount Melbourne ; 
and though this administration was soon dismissed by the King, whose 
sympathies had now veered round to the Tories, and succeeded for a 
short time by a Ministry under Sir Robert Peel (Nov. 1 834 — April 1835), 
a general election again returned a Whig Parliament, and replaced Lord 
Melbourne in office. Weakened as it was by the growing change of 
political feeling throughout the country, no Ministry has ever wrought 
greater and more beneficial changes than the Whig Ministry under Lord 
Grey and Lo^*d Melbourne during its ten years of rule from 1831 to 
1 84 1. In 1833 the system of slavery which still existed in the British 
colonies, though the Slave Trade was suppressed, was abolished at a 
cost of twenty miUions ; the commercial monopoly of the East India 
Company was abolished, and the trade to the East throwm open to 
all merchants. In 1834 the growing evil of pauperism was checked 
by the enactment of a New Poor Law. In 1835 the Municipal Corpora- 
tions Act restored to the inhabitants of towns those rights of self- 
government of which they had been deprived since the fourteenth 
century. 1836 saw the passing of the General Registration Act, while 
the constant quarrels over tithe were remedied by the Act for Tithe 
Commutation, and one of the grievances of Dissenters redressed by a 
measure which allowed civil marriage. A system of national educa- 
tion, begun in 1834 by a small annual grant towards the erection of 
schools, was developed in 1839 by the creation of a Committee of the 
Privy Council for educational purposes and by the steady increase of 
educational grants. 

Great however as these measures were, the difficulties of the Whig 
Ministry grew steadily year by year. Ireland, where O'Connell 
maintained an incessant agitation for the Repeal of the Union, could 
only be held down by Coercion Acts. In spite of the impulse given 
to trade by the system of steam communication v/hich began with the 
opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the country 
still suffered from distress : and the discontent of the poorer classes 
gave rise in 1839 to riotous demands for "the People's Charter,'^ including 
universal suffrage, vote by ballot, annual Parliaments, equal electoral 
districts, the abolition of all property qualification for members, and 
payment for their services. In Canada a quarrel betw^een the two 
districts of Upper and Lower Canada was suffered through misma- 
nagement to grow into a formidable revolt. The vigorous but meddle- 
some way in w^hich Lord Palmerston, a disciple of Canning, carried 
out that statesman's foreign policy, supporting Donna Maria as 
sovereign in Portugal and Isabella as Queen in Spain against claimants 
of more absolutist tendencies by a Quadruple Alliance with France and 
the two countries of the Peninsula, and forcing Mehemet Ali, the 
Pacha of Egypt, to withdraw from an attack on Turkey by the 
bombardment of Acre in 1840, created general uneasiness; while 



8i6 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



the public conscience was wounded by a war with China in 1839 
on its refusal to allow the smuggling of opium into its dominions, 
A more terrible blow was given to the Ministry by events in India ; 
where the occupation of Cabul in 1839 ended two years later in a 
general revolt of the Affghans and in the loss of a British army in the 
Khyber Pass. The strength of the Government was restored for a time 
by the death of William the Fourth in 1837 and the accession of Victoria, 
the daughter of his brother Edward, Duke of Kent. With the accession 
of Queen Victoria ended the union of England and Hanover under the 
same sovereigns, the latter state passing to the next m.ale heir, Ernest, 
Duke of Cumberland. But the Whig hold on the House of Commons 
passed steadily away, and a general election in 1 841 gave their opponents, 
who now took the name of Conservatives, a majority of nearly a 
hundred members. The general confidence in Sir Robert Peel, who 
was placed at the head of the Ministry which followed that of Lord 
Melbourne, enabled him to deal vigorously with two of the difficulties 
which had most hampered his predecessors. The disorder of the 
public finances was repaired by the repeal of a host of oppressive and 
useless duties and by the imposition of an Income Tax. In Ireland 
Q'Connell was charged with sedition and convicted, and though sub- 
sequently reljsased from prison on appeal to the House of .Lords, his 
influence received a shock from which it never recovered. Peace was 
made with China by a treaty which threw open some of its ports to 
traders of all nations ; and in India the disaster of Cabul was avenged 
by an expedition under General Pollock which penetrated victoriously 
to the capital of that countr}'- in 1842. The shock, however, to the 
English power brought about fresh struggles for supremacy with the 
natives, and especially with the Sikhs, who were crushed for the time 
in three great battles at Moodkee, Ferozeshah, and Sobraon (1845 
and 1846) and the province of Scinde annexed to the British domi- 
nions. 

Successful as it proved itself abroad, the Conservative Government 
encountered unexpected difficulties at home. From the enactment of 
the Corn Laws in 18 15 a dispute had constantly gone on between those 
who advocated these and similar measures as a protection to native 
industry and those who, viewing them as simply laying a tax on the 
consumer for the benefit of the producer, claimed entire freedom 
of trade with the world. In 1839 an Anti-Corn-Law League had 
been formed to enforce the views of the advocates of free trade ; 
and it was in great measure the alarm of the farmers and landowners^ . 
at its action which had induced them to give so vigorous a support tl ? 
Sir Robert Peel. But though Peel entered office pledged to protectivvj 
measures, his own mind was slowly veering round to a conviction o^\ 
their inexpediency ; and in 1846 the failure of the potato crop in Ireland: 
and of the harvest in Eno^land forced him to introduce a bill for the 



EPILOGUE. 



817 



1815- 
1873. 



Russian 

and 

Sepoy 

"Wais. 



:peal of the Corn Laws. The bill passed, but the resentraent of his | Epilogue. 

vn party soon drove him from office ; and he was succeeded by a 

/"hig Ministry under Lord John Russell which remained in power till 

■^52. The first work of this Ministry was to carry out the pohcy of 

ree trade into every department of British commerce ; and from that 

' ne to this the maxim of the League, to " buy in the cheapest market 

id sell in the dearest," has been accepted as the law of our commercial 

)iicy. Other events were few. The general overthrow of the con- 

lental monarchs in the Revolution of 1848 found faint echoes in 

feeble rising in Ireland under Smith O'Brien which was easily sup- 

essed by a few policemen, and in a demonstration of the Chartists 

I. London which passed off without further disturbance. A fresh war 

.vith the Sikhs in 1848 was closed by the victory of Goojerat and the 

uiexation of the Punjaub. 

The long peace which had been maintained between the European 

>wers since the treaties of 181 5 was now drawing to a close. In 1852 

e Ministry of Lord John Russell was displaced by a s-hort return of 

e Conservatives to power under Lord Derby ; but a union of the 

■ 'higs with the Free Trade followers of Sir Robert Peel restored them 

office in the beginning of 1853. Lord Aberdeen,' the head of the new 

.('ministration, was at once compelled to resist the attempts of Russia 

t force on Turkey a humiliating treaty ; and in 1854 England allied 

rself with Louis Napoleon, who had declared himself Emperor of 

. nch, to resist the invasion of the Danubian Principalities by a 

I army. The army was withdrawn ; but in September the allied 

:nded on the shores oi the Crimea, and after a victory at the 

Alma undertook the siege of Sebastopol. The garrison however 

LOved as strong as the besiegers, and as fresh Russian forces 

c:. the Crimea the Allies found themselves besieged in their turn. 

jck on the English position at Inkermann on November the 5th 

pulsed with the aid of a French division ; but winter proved 

:;rrrible than the Russian sword, and the English force wasted 

•;>'ith cold or disease. The pubhc indignation at its sufferings 

1 che Aberdeen Ministry from office in the opening of 1855 ; and 

r aimer ston became Premier with a Ministry which included 

raembers of the last administration who were held to be most in 

;^i in the prosecution of the war. After a siege of nearly a year 

' Hies at last became masters of Sebastopol in September, and 

i' ;, spent with the strife, consented in 1856 to the Peace of Pans. 

Military reputation of England had fallen low during the struggle, 

> this cause the mutiny of the native troops in Bengal, which 

iy followed in 1857, may partly be attributed. Russian intrigues, 

;■ i fanaticism, resentment at the annexation of the kingdom of 

':?y Lord Dalhousie, and a fanatical belief on the part of the I 

3 G 



8i8 



HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 



Hindoos that the English Government had resolved to make them 
Christians by forcing them to lose their caste, have all been assigned as 
causes of an outbreak which still remains mysterious. A mutiny at 
Meerut in May 1857 was followed by the seizure of Delhi where the 
native king was enthroned as Emperor of Hindostan, by a fresh 
mutiny and massacre of the Europeans at Cawnpore, by the rising of 
Oude and the siege of the Residency at Lucknow. The number of 
English troops in India was small, and for the moment all Eastern and 
Central Hindostan seemed lost ; but Madras, Bombay, and the Punjaub 
remained untouched, and the English in Bengal and Oude not only held 
their ground but marched upon Delhi, and in September took the town 
by storm. Two months later the arrival of reinforcements under Sir 
Colin Campbell relieved Lucknow, which had been saved till now by 
the heroic advance of Sir Henry Havelock with a handful of troops, 
and cleared Oude of the mutineers. The suppression of the revolt was 
followed by a change in the government of India, which was transferr-^ - 
in 1858 from the Company to the Crown ; the Queen being form^ 
proclaimed its sovereign, and the Governor- General becoming li :? 
Viceroy. ^' 

The credit which Lord Palmerston won during the struggle wit 
Russia and the Sepoys was shaken by his conduct in proposing zn 
alteration in the law respecting conspiracies in 1858, in consequence 
of an attempt to assassinate Napoleon the Third which was believed 
to have originated on English ground. The violent language of the 
French army brought about a movement for the enlistment of a Volun- 
teer force, which soon reached a hundred and fifty thousand men ; 
and so great was the irritation it caused that the bill, which was thought 
to have been introduced in deference to the demands of France, was 
rejected by the House of Commons. Lord Derby again became 
Prime Minister for a few months; but a fresh election in 1859 brought 
back Lord Palmerston, whose Ministry lasted till his death in i86f>.* 
At home his policy was one of pure inaction ; a«id his whole ener >£! 
was directed to the preservation of English neutrality in five jgrr^ /,c 
strifes which distracted not only Europe but the New World, a Wcci 
between France and Austria in 1859 which ended in the creation J 
the kingdom of Italy, a civil war in America which began with ij .i: 
secession of the Southern States in 1861 and ended four years la j 
in their subjugation, an insurrection of Poland in 1863, an atti: ^ 
of France upon Mexico, and of Austria and Prussia upon Denma^ 
in 1864. The American war, by its interference with the supply j 
cotton, reduced Lancashire to distress; while the fitting out of piratic 
cruisers in English harbours in the name of the Southern Confederatio; 
gave America just grounds for an irritation which was only allayed a 
a far later time. Peace however, was successfully preserved ; and th* 



EPILOGUE, 



819 



policy of non-intervention was pursued after Lord Palmerston's death 
bv his successor, Lord Russell, who remained neutral during the brief 
but decisive conflict between Prussia and Austria in 1866 which trans- 
ferred to the former the headship of Germany. 

With Lord Palmerston, however, passed away the policy of 
political inaction which distinguished his rule. Lord Russell had long 
striven to bring about a further reform of Parliament ; and in 1 866 
he laid a bill for that purpose before the House of Commons, whose 
rejection was followed by the resignation of the Ministry. Lord Derby, 
who again became Prime Minister, with Mr. Disraeli as leader of the 
House of Commons, found himself however driven to introduce 
in 1867 a Reform Bill of a far more sweeping character than that 
which had failed in Lord Russell's hands. By this measure, which 
passed in August 1867, the borough franchise was extended to all rate- 
payers, as well as to lodgers occupying rooms of the annual value of 
/'o; the county franchise was reduced to ^12, thirty-three members 
withdrawn from English boroughs, twenty-five of whom were 
.sferred to English counties, and the rest assigned to Scotland and 
Ir iand. Large numbers of the working classes were thus added to 
thje constituencies ; and the indirect effect of this great measure was 
a(,once seen in the vigorous policy of the Parliament which assembled 
after the new^ elections in 1868. Mr. Disraeli, who had become Prime 
Minister on the withdrawal of Lord Derby, retired quietly on finding 
that a Liberal majority of over one hundred members had been returned 
to the House of Commons ; and his place was taken by Mr. Gladstone, 
at the head of a Ministry which for the first time included every section 
of the Liberal party. A succession of great measures proved the 
strength and energy of the new administration. Its first work was 
with Ireland, whose chronic discontent it endeavoured to remove by 
the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in 
. - 39, and by a Land Bill which established a sort of tenant-right in 
'^ cry part of the country in 1870. The claims of the Nonconfonnists 
:re met in 1868 by the abolition of compulsory church-rates, and in 
f. 71 by the abolition of all religious tests for admission to ofhces or 

igrees in the Universities. Important reforms were undertaken in 

"■. p management of the navy ; and a plan for the entire reorganization 
^\ the anny was carried into effect after the system of promotion to 
-ts command by purchase had been put an end to. In 1870 the 
"^ estion of national education was %rthered by a bill which provided 

- the establishment of School Boards in every district, anu for their 

Dport by means of local rates. In 1871 a fresh step in Paiiiamentary 

i^^oxnx was made by the passing of a measure which enabled the 

i;>tes of electors to be given in secret by means of the ballot. The 

Teatness and rapidity of these changes, however, produced so rapid a 



Epilogub. 

1815- 
1873. 



The 
New Re- 
fonnen»< 



3 G 2 



Sio 



Ms TORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 



Epilogue. 
1873, 



reaction in tlie minds of the constituencies that on the failure of his 
attempt to pass a bill for organizing the higher education of Ireland. 
Mr. Gladstone felt himself forced in 1874 to consult public opinion 
by a dissolution of Parliament ; and the return of a Conservative 
majority of nearly seventy members was necessarily follo\^ed by his^ 
retirement from ofhce, Mr. Disraeli again becomiiig First Minister 
df the Crown, 



INDEX, 



Abbo of Fieury, in England, 54 
Abbot, Archbishop, his intolerance, 458 

his iconoclasm, 497 
Abelard, his lectures attended by Englishmen, 

Abercromby, General, his vlctoi-y ; see Battles 
Abhorrers ; see Petitioners and Abhorrers 
Acts of Parliament ; see Statutes 
Acquitaine, loss of, 226 
Acre, defence of; see Smith (S"r Sidney) 
Addington becomes Prime Minister, 794 
Adelard, of Bath, 83 

his services to the unlyer^itles, 127, 128 
Adjutators, cojancil of, 548 
Alfred ; >r.?^yElfred 
ytlfgar, Earl of A'J ercia, exile of^ 66 
Alfred, comes to the throne, 44 
drives back the Danes, 44, 45 
makes peace, 45 
his object-:, 45, 46 
his governmerit, 46, 47 
his literary work, 47, 48 
sayings gf, compiled in Henry the S,econd's 
time, 114 
Alfred, Edmund Ironside is brother, attacks 
England, 63 
his eyes torn out by Harold, ib. 
^lia, a leader of the Jutes, 10 

king of Dei.ra, 17 
^thelbaM, of Merc^a, 35, 36 

his repulse from Wessex, 39 
/Ethelberht, his rule in Kent, 17 
h's conversion, 18 
effect ot his death, 20 
yEthelburh, wife of Ini, 41 

yEihelflaed, ^Elfred's daughter, marries /Ethel- 
red, 44 
lady of IVIercia, 50 
conquers the five boroughs, 50 
fortifies Tpmworth and .Stafford, 50 
iEthe'frith, founds the kingdom of Northum- 
berland, 15 
massacres monks of Bangor 15, xS 
effect of his victories, 16 
effect of his death, 17 
iEthelred, king of Mercia, 34 
-^thelred, son of iEtheUvulf, 43 

makes the peace of Nottinglia::;!, 44 
his death, 44 
^thelred, Alfred's son-in-law, 4^ 

his victories over Danes, 49 
iEthelred, the Unready, buys peace from 
Danes, 57 
orders massacre of St. Brice's day, S7 
driven from England to Normandy, 58 



^Ethelstan, conquers West Wales, 51 

his victory at Brunanburgh, 51 
^Ethelthryth, founds abbey of Ely, 32 
iEthelwold, his school at Abingdon, 54 

bishop of Winchester, 54 
yEthelwulf, king of Wessex, 43 

struggle with Danes, 43 
Agricola, Julius • see Britain, Roman conquest 

of 
Aidan, sent to Northumbria as a missIonar\', 
22 

his blessing on Oswald, 22, 23 

his miracle against Penda, 23 

Cuthbert's vision of him, 25 

effect of his work, 28 
Aix-la-Chape'le, peace of, 726 
Albemarle, Stephen of, insurrection in Ya^ 

favour, 86 
Albigenses, 143, 144 
Alcwine or Alcuin,'as an authority, 33 

his assistance to Bede, 38 

averts war between Offa and Charles, 41 
Aldgate, surrendered by Cnihtena-gild, 92 
Alexander, First of Russia, allies himself with 

Napoleon, 799 
Alfune builds St. Giles's In twelfth century, 92 
Allen driven from Oxford by Elizabeth, 400 
AUeyne, author of "Alarm to the Unconverted," 
612 
^ his death, 612 
Alliance, the Triple ; see Temple, Sir Wiiliam. 
Alva, his appearance in Flanders, 381 

the revolt against, 404 
America, discovery oi, 297 

(United States of) rise of, 738 — 740 

attitude of George the Third towards, 752, 
753 ; see also Massachusetts, Virginia, 
Boston, Washington 

congress of, in 1775, 754 

Declaration of Independence, 756 

final recognition of its independence, 762 

effect of it, 762, 763 

alliance with France, 775 

alliance with Napoleon, 802, 803, 807, 808 

civil war and its effects, 818 
Amiens, mise of; see Lewis the Ninth 

peace of, 794, 795 
Anderida, siege of, 10 
Andrewes, bishop, his declaration about James 

the First, 489 
Andredswold, 10 

Danish position there. 49 
Anglesey, conquered by Eadwine, 16 
Anjou, the line of, its character, 94, 95 
Anne deserts her father, ^66 



INDEX. 



r, influence on her of Duchess of Marl- 
borough ; see Marlborough, Duchess of 
ecalled by William, 690 
ner accession and policy, 690, 691 
ler assent to the Act of Union with Scot- 
land, 697 
er Toryism, 698 
: m, becomes Prior of Bee, 69 
,is works, 70 

lade Archbishop of Canterbury, 86 
is struggle against William Rufus, 87 
is share in the marriage of Henry, 88 
'■ is recall by Henry, 88 
ipports Henry against Robert, 92 
b effect on our literature, 113 
•ry, English, Edward the First's use of it, 

177 
. :ecture, impulse given to, by the Jews, 83 
i defence of, 734 
e, Earl of, his relations with Charles the 

First, 524 
bis struggle with Montrose, 540, 541 
Lis reception of Cromwell, 563 
^ s execution, 619 

5, Earl of, in James the Second's time, his 

condemnation, 649 

s insurrection, 650 

s execution, ib. 

ight, his invention of spinning-machine, 

68 
' ; effects, 805 

•■^y William the Conqueror's mother, 71 
'■ r -ton. Lord, his dislike of France, 623 
.s part in the Triple Alliance, 624 
t s share in the Treaty of Dover, 625 

5 advice about the Test Act, 627 

la, the Spanish, struggle with, 409 — 412 

new one threatened by Philip, 430 

;h. University of, 21 

plot to free Strafford, 522 

I, General, his attack on Canada, 755, 

75^ 

•, of Brittany, taken prisoner and 

murdered by John, iii 

•, of England, " dreams of," a romance, 

115 

5 tomb ; see Glastonbury 

mances about, 115 

n, his view of the effect of Italian litera- 
ture on England 391 
' Anne, burnt, 349 

■, Lord, opposes the Act of Uniformity, 

609 

fends Charles's proposal to dispense with 

it, 611 

poses the Five Mile Act, 622 

> dislike of France, and support of Pro- 
testantism, 623 

> attitude towards Holland, 625 ; see also 
Cooper, Shaftesbury 

the friend of Alfred, 48 
of Clarendon ; see Clarendon 
• - of Arms, 106 

-e.v, Sir Jacob, his view of the battle of 
Stow, 541, 542 
\die!v>ey, Alfred at, 45 
A i. riiary. Bishop of Rochester, his removal 

from his bishopric, 709 
Aibrcy, his account of Hobbes, 602 
Augsburg, peace of, 669 



Augustine, mission of, 17 
lands in Kent, 17 
his work, 18 



Bacon, Roger, studied under Rabbis, 83,133 

his story, 133, 135 

his " Opus Majus," 135, 136 

his death and subsequent fame, 136 

why allowed books, 146 

his rank as a schoolman, 147 
Bacon Francis, his view of the friars, 147 

a type of the new literature, 399, 413 

his view of ecclesiastical policy, 404 

his opinion of the Brownists, 542, 543 

his career, 591, 597 
Badbie, John, burnt as a heretic, 259 
Bseda, his story of the Frisian slave-dealer, 23 

effect of his Latin History, 18 

his story of the sparrow, 20 

its significance, 27 

his career, 36, 37 

account of his Ecclesiastical History, :;7, 

his death, 38 

his letter to Archbishop Ecgberht, 38, 39 

his history translated by ^Elfred, 48 
rediscovered by Layamon, 117 
Bagdad, knowledge brought from, 128 
Ball, John, 233, 243, 244 
Balliol, John, 182—184 

Edward, 207, 209 
Baltimore, Lord, colonizes Maryland, 492 
Bamborough, Penda'^s attack on, 23 
Bancroft, Archbishop, his suppression of Cal- 
vinism, 458 
Bangor, massacre of the monks of, 15 
Bank of England : see Montague 
Bannockburn ; see Battles 
Baptists, rise of, 543 
Barebones Parliament, 565 — 567 
Barlow made Bishop of St. David's, 345 
Baronius, 462 
Barons, greater and lesser, 168 

theii power after the struggle with Henry 
the Third, 195 — 197 
Barrow, his influence on Newton, 599 
Batholomew's Day, St., in 1662, 603 ; see a!so 

St. Bartholomew 
Bastwick, the Puritan, 512 
Battle Abbey, 76, 88 
Battles, Aboukir, 794 

Aclea, 43 

Agincourt, 261, 262 

Assandun, 61 

Assaye, 796 

Athenry, 43^ 

Austerlitz, 797 

Aylesford, 8, g 

Badon (Mount), is 

Bannockburn, 206 

Barbury Hill, 14 

Barnet, 281 

Bensington, 40 

Blenheim, 693 

Borodino, 804 = 

Bouvines, 121, 123 .' 

Boyne, 676, 677 / 

Bradford, 32 

Brunanburgh, 51 



INDEX, 



823 



Bat f ] es —continued. 
Bunker's Hill, 755 
Burford, 36 
Buttington, 49 
Camperdown, 786 
Chalgrove, 533 
Charford, 11 
Charmouth, 43 
Chester, 16, 157 
Chippewa, 808 
Conquereux, 97 
Copenhagen, 795 
Corunna, 800 
Cressy, 219 — 221 
Culloden, 725, 726 
Deorham, 14, 157 
Dettingen, 723 
Dunbar, 559 
Edgehill, 531 
Edington, 45 
Ellandun, 41 
Evesham, 154 
Falkirk, 186 
Fleurus, 784 
Flodden, 372, 373 
Fontenoy, 723, 724 
j Fuentes d'Onoro, 802 
I Halidon Hill, 209 
Hastings ; see Senlac 
Hatfield, 20 
Heavensfield, 21 
: Hengestesdun, 43 
I Homildon Hill, 372, 373 
Tnverlochy, 540 
Jemappes, 782 
Jena, 798 
June 2ist, 786 
Killiecrankie, 670 
Kilsyth, 541 
La Hogue, 679 
Lansdowne Hill, 532 
Leipzig, 807 
Lewes, 152 
Lexington, 755 
Malplaquet, 699 
Marengo, 787 
INIarignano, 316 
Marston Moor, 535 
Maserfeld, 23 
Minden, 734 

Mortemer, 72 
Mortimer's Cross, 278 

Mount Badon ; see Badon (Mount) 

Na?eby, 540, 541 

Navarete, 226 

Nechtansmere, 33 

Neville's Cross, 221, 372 

Newbury, 533 

Newtown Butler, 672 

Nile, the, 786 

Northallerton, 99 

Oithe^, 807 

Otford, 39 

Otterburn, 372, 373 

Parret, 43 

Philiphaugh, 541 

Pinkie Clough, 372, 37 ^ 

Plassey, 734 

Poitiers, 222—224 

Preston Pans, 725 



Battles — continued. 
Quebec, 737 
Quiberon, 735 
Ramillies, 695, 696 
Rossbach, 732 
Salamanca, 804 
Saratoga, 757, 758 
Secandun, 36 
Sedgemoor, 650 
Senlac, 75, 76 
SherifFmuir, 706 
Shrewsbury, 259 
Solway Moor, 372, 373 
Somerton, 36 
St. Albans, 276—278 
Stamford Bridge, 75 
Stirling, 185 
Stow, 541 

St, Vincent, 761, 78G 
Talavera, 801 
Tenchebray, 93 
Torres Vedras, 802 
Toulon, 784 
Toulouse, 807 
Towton, 279 
Trafalgar, 796, 79.7 
Val-es-dunes, 71 
Valmy, 781 
Varaville, 73 
Vimiera, 800 
Vinegar Hill, 786 
Vittoria, 807 
Wagram, 801 
Wakefield, 278 
Wareham, 44 
Waterloo, 810, 8ir 
Winwced, 24 
Worcester, 561 
Baxter, Richard, his estimate of CromweH's 
church appointments, 573 
his attitude towards Richard Cromwell, 

.580 
his reputation as a controversialist, 609, 

610 
his account of the expulsion of the non- 
conformist clergy, 612 
his opposition to the Declaration of Indul- 
gence, 655 
Bayeux, Norse language remains at, 68 

tapestry of, as an authority, 70 
Beaufort, Cardinal, his position at the accession 
of Henry the Sixth, 267 
leads the war party, 274 
Beaumont contrasted with Ben Jonson, 428 
Bee, Abbey of, founded by Herlouin, 68 
Becket ; see Beket 
Bede, the Venerable ; see Baeda 
Bedford, Duke of, in Henry the Sixth's, time, 
effect of his death, 267 
his relations with the Duke of Glouces 
ter, 269 
Bedford, Lord, in Charles the First's time, 

proposal of the king to him, 522 
Bedford, Duke of, in George the Third's time, 

his character and policy, 745, 749 
Bedloe, his assistance to Gates, 637 
Beggars in Elizabeth's reign, 384, 385 
Beket, Gilbert, father of the archbishop, 89 
Thomas, first English Archbishop of Can- 
terbury since the Conquest, 91 



J524 



INDEX, 



Beket — coiiiinued. 

influenced bv the Cistercians, 92 
his relations witli Theobald, 99 
his education, 100 

invites Henry the Second to England, ib. 
fights in France, 102 

his election to the See of Canterbury'-, 103 
his struggle with Henry, 103 — 105 
his death, 105 
Bellarmine, Cardinal, 462 
Benedict of Peterborough, 114 
Benedict, Biscop, his abbey at Jarrow, 30 

his journeys, ib. 
Benfleet, Danish camp at, 49 
Bentham, Jeremy, his creed, 806 
Benoit de Saint Maur as an authority, 70 
Beornred, set up by Offa in Wessex, 41 
Beornwulf, his struggles and death, 41 
Bercta. her marriage with ^thelberht, 17 
Berkley, Judge, his opinion on Hampden's 

case, 514 
Bemicla, kingdom of, 15, t6 
Bertrand de Born leads an insurrection against 

Richard the First, 109 
Berwick, Edward the First's attack on, 184 
cause of its peculiar position, 209 
pacification of, 516 
Bessin, the, ravaged by the French, 73 
Beverley, Alfred of, his history, 115 
Bigod, Earl, threatened by Henry the Third, 

149 
Bigod, Earl Roger, opposes Edward the First, 

200 
Bill of Rights : see 'Statutes 
Birinus, a missionary in Wessex, 22 
Biscop, Benedict, his career, 28 
Bishops, the Seven, trial and acquittal of, 657 
its effect, 663 ; .;ee Sancroft, Jefferys, &c. 
Black Death, the, its effects, 241, 242 
Blake, Admiral, 558, 562, 563, 576 

his body taken from the grave, 608 
Blanchard, a French patriot, 262 
Blood-bond, the, in early England, 3 
Blount, Francis, at Edward the Second's de- 
position, 204 
Blucher, General, 810 

Hoccaccio, opinion held of, in England, 391 
Boethius, Consolations of, translated by iElfred, 

48 
Bohemia, James the First's policy towards, 

474, 475 
Bohun, ^ Humfrey de, oppose^s Edward the 

First, 200 
Boisil, a missionary, 22 

Boleyn, Anne, Henry's passion for her, 321, 
.3?3 
his indecent conduct about her, 329 
her coronation, 330 
her execution, 348 

her influence on the character of Elizabeth, 
363 
Bolingbroke, Lord, comes into office, 695 
dismissed from office, 698 
his attacks on the war with France, 699 
his treaty of commerce, 703 
his intrigues with the Pretender, ib. 
his policy, 704, 712 
Bologna, university of, in the thirteenth cen- 
tury, 128, 131 
Boniface, the missionary, 40 



Boniface the Eighth (Pope), his claims, r2f^ 

his Bull Clericis Laicos, 199 
Bonner, Bishop, his character and persecu- 
tion, 358, 359 
his " Six Bibles," 447, 448 
Boroughs, representation of, 171 — 173 

rise of, 187 — 189 
Boston, attacks on tea-ships at, 753 
Bothwell, his character, 379, 380 
Bouvines ; see Battles ; effects of, 122, 123 
Boyle invents the air-pump, 599 
" Bo3^s," the party so-called, 714 
Boyne ; see Battles 

Bradshaw, John, made Judge of High Court, 
554 

sits in Parliament of 1654, 568 

his body taken frcm the grave, 608 
Bretigny, treaty of, 224 
Brigham, treaty of, 183 
Britain, Roman conquest of, 5 

effect of that conquest on, 6 

descent of the northern nations on, 6, 7 

their conquest of it, 8 — 12 
Britons, th,eir attempted extermination, g, 10 

their later struggles, 13 — 16 
Brittany, conquest of, by Fulc of Anjou, 96 
Brttany, duke of, Arthur ; j^^ Arthur 
Biookt., Lord, a leader of the Presbyterian? 

526 
Brougham. Lord, helps to edit Edinburgi 

Review, 806 
Browne, Archbishop, 439 
Brownists, the, 459, 542, 543 
Bruce, Robert, his claims on Scotland, 182 

joins the English, 184 

struggles for independence of Scotland 
186 

Edward the Second's truce with, 203 

further struggles of, 204 — 207 
Bruce, David, 209, 210 

Brunswick, Duke of, marches against France, 
781 ^ 

effect of his march, ib, \ his retreat, 782 
Bruno, Elizabeth's discussion with, 366 
Bucer, burning of his bones, 361 j 

Buckingham, Duke of, Edward Boh an, hits \ 
execution, 318 

George Villiers the First, James's favour j 
for, 474 . 

James's warning to, 480 

Charles the First's defence of, 483 

his impeachment, ib. 

his policy and its effect, 485 

his rivalry with Strafford, 504 \ 

his death, 487, 488 

George Villiers the Second supports jlie 
old Presbyterian party, 625 

sent to the Tower by Danby, 634 
Bungay, his reputation, 147 
Bunyan, John, 453, 454 

his imprisonment, 6r3 

the "Pilgrim's Progress" and other wi 
ings, 613—615 

opposition to Declaration of Indulgence, 
655 
Buonaparte, Napoleon, defeats the English at 
Toulon, 784 

his successes in Ital3'', 785 

invades Egypt,_786 

defeated in Syria, 786, 787 



INDEX. 



8^5 



Buonaparte — co7ttinued. 

crosses the Alps, 787 

his intrigues in India, 794 

his aims, 795 

his tyranny in France, 796 

his alliance with Russia, 799 

his intrigues in Spain, 799, 800 

his conquest of Austria, 801 

his alliance with America, 803 

his defeat in Russia, 804 

his fall, 807 

his return, 809 

his final overthrow, 810, 811 ; ^^^ also Pitt, 
"Wellington, Battles 
Buonaparte, Jerome, 799 
Buonaparte, Louis, ib. 
Buonaparte, Joseph, ib. 
Burbage, his opinion of Shakspere, 422 
Burdett, Sir Francis, moves for reform of Par- 
liament, 806 
Burgoyne, General, 756, 757 

effect of his defeat, 758 
Burhred, King of Mercia, 43 
Burke, Edmund, point of contact of, with the 
Methodists. 721 

his impeachment of Warren Hastings, 766 

his Bill for Economical Reform, 770 

his attitude towards the Frenc^t Revolu- 
tion, 775, 776 

his early career, ib. 

his political principles, ii^-, 777 

reflections on the French Revolution, 778 

his opposition to Pitt and Fox, 778, 779 

his " appeal .from the new to the old 
Whigs," 779 

his advice to " diffuse terror,'* 781 

spread of his opinions m England, 784, 785 

letters 014 a Regicide Peace, ib, 

his death,' ib. 
Burleigh, Lord, Elizabeth's choice of, 366 

her confidence in him, 374 

zeal for Protestant succession, 379 

opinion of the extravagance of wine- 
buyers, 388 
Burley, the schoolman, his reputation, 147 
Burnet, Bishop, his estimate of Cromwell s rule, 
573 

of Shaftesbury's temper, 629 

of Charles the isecond's temper, ,642 
Burton, the Puritan, 512, 543 
Bute, Lord, his character, 742, 743 

his fall, 745 
Butler, author of " Hud'^bras," 589 

Cabal, the, 639. 
Cabinet, rise of, 639 

the first, 682, 683 
Cabot, Sebastian, his discoveries, 297, 490 

his father, 490 
Cade, Jack, his rising, 275, 276 
Cadwallon, king of W^ales, his struggle against 
Northumbria, 20 

his death, 21 
Caedmon, the first English poet, 18 

story of his vision, 26 

importance of his poem, 27 
Caen sacked by the French, 73 
Csesar, Julius, reveals Britain to Rome. 5 

revival of study of his works in thirteenth 
century, 128 



Cairo, convention of, 794 

Calais, taking of, by Edward the Third, 221, 22a 
Calamy helps the Presbyterians, 526 
Cambridge, University of, our ignorance of its 
early history, 127 
its reputation for heresy, 343 
treatment of, by James the Second, 653 
Cameron ians, their resistance to the Scotch Act 

of Union, 697 
Campbell ; see Colin, 818 
Campian, a Jesuit leader, 401, 402, 462 
Campo Formio, treaty of, 785 
Canada, conquest of," 735 — 737 

establishment of its constitution, 779 
invasion of, by the United States, 808 
later revolts ih, 815 
Canning, George, his devotion to Pitt, 767 
his Ministry, 799 
his firmness after Corunna, 800 
his opinion about Walcheren Expedition, 

801 
his eagerness for Catholic Emancipati'Mn, 

806,813 
his foreign policy, 813 
his death, ib 
Canterbury, Augustine at, 17, 18 
the centre of Latin influence, 18 
plundered by the Danes, 42 
Scriptoriuni of, 114 
Canterbury Tales, 163, 164, 215 — 217 
Capel, Lord, his execution, 556 
Capuchins, the preachers of Catholicism, 462 
Carlisle, conquered by Northumbrians, 29 
Caroline of Anspach, Queen of George the 
Second, 712, 713 
her death, 713 
Carr, James the First's favour to, 474 
Carteret, his policy, 722, 723 
Cartwright, Thomas, 455, 456 

driven from his Professorship, 458, 459 
his organization of the Church, 400 
growth of his doctrines, 526 
Casaubon, his view of English feeling about 

literature, 449 
Castlemaine, Lady, her conversion, 627 
Castlereagh, Lord, his incompetence, 801 
his opposition to reform, 812 
his suicide, 813 
Catherine of Arragon, her sympathy with 
Spain, 318 
her appeal to the Pope, 322 
see also Henry the Eighth 
Catherine the Second of Russia, her partitions 

of Poland, 775 
Catholics, Roman, feelings of, towards Eliza- 
beth, 369, 375 _ 
their revolts against her, 382—384 
their relations with Mary Stuart, 377, 375 
decline of their faith, 398 
persecution of them, 401 
their attitude during the reigns of Eliza- 
beth and James the First, 460 — 463 
Charles the First's policy towards them, 

481 
excluded from the Parliament (of 1657,) 

579 
their hopes in Charles the Second's reign, 

their position in Ireland, 789 

struggle for their emancipation, 793, 814 



§26 



INDEX. 



Cato Street Conspiracy, 813 

Cavendish, family of, rise of, from spoil of 

monasteries, 342 
Cavendish, Lord, helps to lead country party, 
627 
his support of William the Third, 664 
Caxton, William, his career, 289—293 
Ceadda ; see Chad, S. 
Cecil, William ; see Burleigh, Lord 
Cecil, Robert, Elizabeth's speech to, 446 

effect of his death, 473, 474 
Cecil, the Evangelical, 721 
Cedd, his visit to Chad, 24 
Centwine, King of Wessex, 34 
Cenwulf, succeeds Offa in Mercia, 41 
Ceolfrid, a scholar of Biscop's, 36 
Ceolwulf, King of Northumbria, 36 
Ceorl : see Churl 

Cerdic, chosen King of West Saxons, 11, 12 
Ceylon retained by England at Peace of 

Amiens, 795 
Chad, S., his mission to the Mercians, 24 

his death, ib 
Chalcondylas lectures at Oxford, 298 
Chancery, court of, in reign of Edward the 
First, 165 
reformed by Cromwell, 573 
Charles liie Great, his struggle with Offa, 40, 41 
Charles the Fifth, the Emperor, Luther's answer 
to him, 314 
his policy towards Henry the Eighth, 318 
Charles the Sixth of France, 260 
Charles the Tenth of France, his fall, 814 
Charles the First of England 

the proposal about his marriage, 479 — 481 
his conduct towards the Catholics, 481 
his view of Parliaments, 483 
his defence of Buckingham, ib. ; see Buck- 
ingham, Eliot, Pyni, Hampden 
his suppression of Parliaments ; see Parlia- 
his financial policy, 500, 501 [ments 

his obstinacy, 503 
attempts to arrest five members, and 

effect of his attempt, 528, 529 
raises standard at Nottingham, 530 
his intrigues after Naseby, 546, 547 
his trial and death, 554 
effect of his death, 555 
Charles the Second, his accession, 582 
importance of his_ time, 587, 588 
his study of physical science, 598 
his vindictive demands, 605, 606 
his policy about the Act of Uniformity, 

609, r>ii 
his character, 616 — 619 
his feeling about Roman Catholicism, 620 
his view of England contrasted with that 

of James the Second, 621 
his relations with Lewis the Fourteenth, 
62T, 622 
Chirles Edward, the Young Pretender, his 
insurrection against George the Second, 
724—726 
Charter of Henry the First, 87 
of London, 89 
the Great, 123 — 125 
the Forest, 200 
Chateau Gaillard, its importance to Richard 
the First, no, in 
to English history, 112 



Chatham, Earl of, tffect of Pitt's taking the 
title, 748 
his illness, 748, 749 
takes up parliamentary reform, 751 
deplores the attack on the Boston tea-ships^ 

.753 
his measures for conciliating America, 754, 

.757 
his death, 757 

effect of his djang appeal, 757, 758 
his plan of parliamentary reform, 770 
see also Pitt, William, the Elder 
Chaucer, his English, 162 
his love of English, 212 
character and work, 213—217 
laughs at pardoners, 229, and abbots, 231 
his exceptional position, 287 
Caxton's reverence for, 290 
Chausselin, French ambassador for Republic, 

781 
Chester, its situat;on, 15 
Danes driven from, 49 

entered by William the Conqueror, 79 ; see 
also Battles 
Chester, Earl of, rebels against Henry the 

Third, 137 
Chesterfield, Lord, 712, 714 
his letters, 717 

his opinion of state of England at time of 
Seven Years' War, 727 
Chettle, his opinion of Shakspere, 422 
Chichester, Bishop of, his relations with De 

Montfort, 153 
Chichester, Sir Arthur, his rule in Ireland, 4^.4 
Chillingworth, his denunciations of persecutiur.. 

600, 601 
China, treaty with, 816 
Chippenham, Danes appear at, 47 
Chivalry of Froissart, 176 

of Edward the First, ib. and 177 
Christianity, original dislike of, by the Northern 
nations who came to England, 12 
introduction of, into England, 17 — 26 
Chronicle, the English, as an authority, 7, 34, 
42 
in iElfred's reign, 48, 49, 59, 78 
Church of England founded by Theodore of 
Tarsus, 29 
reformed by William and Lanfranc, 82 
representation of, in Parliament, 173, 174 
degradation of, in fourteenth and fifteenth 

centuries, 216 
its position from time of Edward the 

Fourth, to that of Elizabeth, 284, 285 
attitude of its leaders towards the New 

Learning, 304 
Erasmus's attitude towards, 307, 308 
More's, 314, 315 
Thomas Cromwell's, 329 
Elizabeth's, 370 
Oliver Cromwell's, 573 
Church of Ireland ; see Ireland, Church of 
Churchill, John, Sunderland's speech to, 655 ; 

see Marlborough, Duke of 
Churl, his position, 3, 4 

Cistercians, revive religious zeal in twelfth cen- 
tury, 91, 92 
Clair-sur-Epte, peace of, 67 
Clare, Lord, rewarded by William the First 
with grants of land, 81 



INDEX. 



827 



Clarendon, Constitutions of, 103 

assize of, 106 
Clarendon, Lord, his view of the state of 
the country in early part of Charles the 
First's reign, 503 
made Chancellor, 605 
his royalism, ib. 
suggests amendments in Act of Uniformity, 

6og 
his fall, 622 

his illegal proclamations, 647 ; se^ also Hyde 
Clarendon, second Lord, 654 

succeeded in government of Ireland by 

Tyrconnell, 663 
intrigues with James, 679 
Clarkson, Thomas, sympathy of the Methodists 

with him, 721 
Claudius, Emperor ; see Britain Roman con- 
quest of 
Clement the Fourth, his friendship for Roger 
Bacon, 135, 136 
the Seventh, Catherine's appeal to ; see 
Catherine of Arragon 
Clifford, Lord, in Heniy the Sixth's time, his 
career, 278 
in Charles the Second's time, his share in 

the treaty of Dover, 625 
his advice about suspending payments, 626 
Clive, Robert, his rise, 732 
his early battles, 734 
helps P'itt to a seat in Parliament, 744 
his reforms in India, 758 
attitude towards him taken by the House 
of Commons, 759 
Closter-Seven, convention of, 727 

Pitt's rejection of it, 732 
Cnut, comes to the throne, 61 
change in his character, ib. 
his letter from Rome, 62 
his laws, 62, 63 
his death, 63 
Coifi, his argument for Christianity', 20 
Coke, Mr., of Norfolk, his large farms, 769 
Coke, Sir Edwa.rd, his reverence for law, 473 

his death, 518 
Coleman., his letters about the Popish Plot, 

6^5* 636 , _ 

Colepepper, his denunciation of monopolists, 502 
leaves Parliament after the Hull affair, 531 
Colet, Dean, his exceptional position, 298 
his teachings, 299, 300 
his school, 305 
his sermons, 303, 306, 307 
Colman, his contest with Wilfrith, 28 
Cologne, University of, its relations with 

Oxford, 146 
Columba founds the monastery of lona, 22 

his authority appealed to, 28 
Columban, an Irish missionary, 21 

effect of his work in England, 22 
Columbus discovers the New World, 297 
Commines, Philip de, his exceptional position, 

297, 298 
Commission, Court of High, its effect, 609 
Commons, House of, how it was formed, 225 
its early timidity, 225, 226 
force of its petitions. 226 
its struggles with John of Gaunt, 227, 228 
its degeneracy under the Lancastrians, 265, 
266 



Commons, House of — continued. 

restriction of the right of election to it, 266 
its attitude in 1520, 327 
its position in Ehzabeth's reign, 395 — 397 
in William the Third's reign, 680, 681 
its relations with Walpole, 711, 712 
its condition in time of elder Pitt, 743, 744 
question of its reform, 750, 751, 769, 770, 
806, 814, 819 ; see also Pitt, Wilkes, 
Chatham, Burdett 
Commonwealth, the Enghsh, 556 — 563 
Commune, rise of, 194 
Companies, Livery, 194 

Compton, Bishop, his suspension from his 
office, 653 
his support of William's claims, 663, 664 
Comyn, John, Edward's vow to avengQ h 3 

murder, 177 
Connecticut ; see Warwick, Earl of 
Conventicle Act, passing of, 611 
Convention, the, in 1660 

its attitude towards Charles the Second, 
605 — 608 
Convocation, silencing of, by Henry the Eighth. 
.331 

it draws up Articles of Religion, 332 
Cooper, Ashley, returned to Barebone's Parlia- 
ment, 565 
opposes Richard Cromwell, 581 
advises the restoration of the expelled 

members, 582 
made Lord Ashley and Chancellor of 
Exchequer, 605 ; see Ashley, Lord, 
Shaftesbury, Lord 
Coote, Sir Eyre, 758, 760 
Cope, Sir John, in 1745, 724, 725 
Copernicus, effect of his discoveries, 297 
Cordova, the learning l^rought from, in the 

twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 128 
Corn, exportation of, by Britain, 5 

Laws, repeal of, 816, 817 
Cornewaile, Richard, on reign of Edward the 

Third, 212 
Cornwall, effect on, of victory of Deorham, 16 

its exceptional position, 532 
Cornwall, Richard, Earl of, rises against Henrv 
the Third, 148 _ 
attitude of, in civil wars, ib. 
is captured at battle of Lewes, 152 
Cormyallis, Lord, his defeat in America, 761 

his rule in Ireland, 793 
Cotentin, conquest of, 63 
Cotton, oppression of, 518 
Council, the Great, 167—169 

(the Royal) Ordinances of, 226 
increased power of, under Edward the 
Fourth, 283 
Country Part3^ the, formation of, 627 
Courtena}^ bishop and archbishop, his relations 
with the Lollards, 235, 251, 252 
Marquis of Exeter, his insurrection and 
execution, 339 
Covenant, the Scotch, signing of, in 1640, 515,516 
Solemn League and, 533, 534 
publicly burnt after Restoration, 608 
abolished in Scotland, 619 
Coventry Sir \\ illiam, helps to lead the Coun- 
try Party, 627 
Coverdale, Miles, revises the translation of the 
Bible, 332 



828 



INDEX. 



Coverdale — continued. 

effect of his trsinslation ; see Erigland, 
Literature of 
Cowper, William, made Lord Keeper, 695 
Craftsmen, rise of, 187 

their gijds, 191 - 193 
Crai^field, Earl of Middlesex, his dismissal, 480 
Cranmer, Thomas, his proposal about the uni- 
versities, 328 

his appointment to Canterbury, 330 

crowns Anne Boleyn, ib. 

pleads for Cromwell, 334 

saved from arrest by Henry, 347 

in danger aftei Six Articles Act, 549 

becomes a decided Protestant, 350, 351: 

arrested, 354 

his executio;i, 359, 360 
Crimea, invasion ot, 818 

Crompton, his invention of the '^Miile," 76.8 
Cromwell, Thomas, his career, 325 — 349 ; see 

also Cranmer 
Cromwell, Oliver, his words at Dunbar, 448 

story of his first attempt to leave England, 

.499 
his second threat of leaving It, 526 
wins Marston Moor, 534 — 536 
his early career, 536, 537 
organizes the Ironsides, 537 — <,y^ 
his attittide towards the Presbyterians, 545 
,, his part in the discussions between Ireton 

and the King, 550 
his victories against Ro3''alists, 1648-9, 552, 

553 
suppresses the mutiny of the troops, 557 
his wars in Ireland and Scotland, 557 — 561 
his dissolution of the Rump, 563, 564 
his Protectorate, 564 — 580 
effect of his death, 581 
his body t^ken from the grave, 608 ; see also 
Battles 
Cromwell, Henry, his settlement of Ireland, 572 
Cromwell, Richard, peaceable accession of, 580 

his reign, 581 
Crowiand, abbey of, its rise, 31 
Cumberland, Earl of, defepds Shipton Castle, 

338, 339 
Customs, English, use of, by William the First, 

81 
Cuthbert, story of his mission, 24 — 26 

his episcopal rule and death, 32 — 34 
Cuthwulf, King of Wes,t-Saxons, 14 



Dacre, Lord, Insurgent in reign of Henry the 
Eighth, 338 

also in reign of Elizabeth, 383 
Dalaber, Anthony, a follower of Tyndale, 343 
Dalhousie, Lord, effect of his annexation of 

Oude, 817 
Danby, Lord, made Treasurer, 632 

his policy, 633- 635 

cause of his fall, 637,, 638 

his impeachment, 640 

his support of William,, 663 — ^6fS 

compared with Walpole, 712 
Danegeld, arranged by Court of Exchequer, 93 
Danelagh, conquest of, by Eadward the Elder, 

50 
Danes, their first invasion of England, 42 — 44 

repulsed by Alfred, 44, 45 



Danes — continiied, 

fresh invasion in reign of .<Ethelred, 57 

massacre of, 57 

invasion of Swegen, 57 

they slay Archbishop ^Ifh^ah, 57 

their conquest of England, 58 

their rule, 60—63 

fall of their power, 63 

they invade England under Swegen, 78 

induced to leave England by William, 79 

invasion of, resisted by William, 85 
Daniel, the poet, 391 
Darcy, Lord, insurgent in reign of Henry the 

Eighth, 338 
Darnley ; see Mary Stuart 
Dartmouth, Lord, interferes with James, 670 
David, of Wales, rebellion and death of, 162, 

Deane, General, his successes, 572 
Declaration of Indulgence by Charles the 
Second, 626 

by James the Second, 655, 656 

of Rights, 670 — 672 

of Independence, 756 
Deira, 15, 16 

becomes Yorkshire, 52 
Dekker, a successor of Heywood, ,425 
De la Mare, Peter, 227 
Denewulf, Bishop of Winchester, 46 
Derby, Earl of, in Victoria's reign, his first 
ministry, 817 

his second ministry, 818 

his Reform Bill, 819 
Derby, Henry, Earl of, his attitude in Richard's 

reign, 256 ; see Henry the Fourth 
Dermot, King of Leinster, 431 — 433 
Desborough, General, resigns his command to 

Cromwell, 578 
Descartes, a contemporary of Bacon, 597 
Desmond, Earl of, treatment of, by Henry the 
Seventh, 435 

by Elizabeth, 443 
D'Espec, influenced by the Cistercians in the 

twelth century, 91, 92 
Despensers, the, career of, 202 — 204 
Devonshire, effect on, of victory of Deorham, x6 

men of, rise against Normans, 78 
De Witt, his utterance about English sailors, 
.615 . 

his policy towards France, 660 

his fall, 660 
Digby, Lord, his .denunciation of Strafford, 
, _ 52i,_ 522 
DIgges, Sir Dudley, his taunt to Buckingham, 

483 

his imprisonment,^ 484 
Disraeli, Benjamin, his Reform Bill, 819 

his different ministries, 819 
Domesday Book as an authority, 78 

how it was compiled, 82 
Dominic, zeal of 144 
Dominicans, lectures of, at Oxford, 146 
Dorchester, established as the political see of 

South Britain, 20 
Dorsetshire, the men of, rise against the Nor- 
mans, 78 
Douglas, his relations with Bruce, 206 — 208 
Dover secured by William the Conqueror, 676 

its resistance to Lewis of France, 126 

treaty of, 625 



INDEX. 



829 



Drake, Sir Francis, his early career, 406, 407 


Ealdred, Archbishop of York, crowns Wiliiam 


his check to the A.rmada, 409 


the Conqueror, 77 


his final defeat of it, 411 


Ealhred of Northumbria, his appeal to Charles 


his voyage round the world, 413 


the Great, 40 


Drogheda, massacre of, 557 


Ealhstan, bishop of Sherburne, 43 


Dryden, his view of the importance of the 


Eardwulf, King of Northumbria, received v/hen 


Triple Alliance, 624 


an exile by Charles the Great, 40 


his account of Shaftesbury, 628, 629 


East Anglia, conquered by the Jutes, 17 


Dudo of Quentin, as an authority, 670 


becomes Christiarn, 18 


Dumbarton, capture of, 29 


conquered by Mercia, 40 


Dumouriez, General, his first successes, 781, 


rebels against Mercia, 41 


782 


landing of the Danes there, 43 


Dundee, Marquis of, his struggle agamst 


Earldom of, created by Cnut, 61 ; see also 


William the Third, 670 


Eadmund, Radwald 


Duns Scotus, his rank as a schoolman, 147 


East Saxons ; see Essex, Saxons' 


Dunstan, his early life, 51 


their settlement, 13, 14 


Abbot of Glastonbury, 52 


conquered by Northumbria, 19 


Minister of Eadmund, 52 


heathendom of their kings, 20 


policy of, 53 


Ebbs-fleet, first landing-place of EngUsh la 


exiled, 53 


Britain, 7 


Bishop of London and Winchester, 53 


of Augustine, 17 


Archbishop of Canterbury-. 53 


F2cclesiastical Commission, 457, 458 


Minister of Eadgar, revives monasteries, 54 


Ecgberht, Archbishop of York, Baeda's letter 


crowns Eadward the Martyr, 56 


to, 38, 39 


death of, 57 


Ecgberht, Kmg of Wessex, 41 


importance of his life, 114. 


his conquests, 41, 42 


Dupleix, founds French empire in India, 726 


becomes king of the English, ib. 


his career, 732—734 


his work undone by the Danes, 44 


Durham, Bishop of, at battle of Falkirk, 186 


Ecgfrith, his relations with his wife, 32 


Durrow, University at, 21 


his rule of Northumbria, ib. 


Dykvelt, his- work for William of Orange in 


his defeat, and death, 33 


England, 663 


effect of his death, 34 




his conquest of Scotland, 179 


Ejvdberht, king of Northumbria, 39 


Ecgwine, Bishop of Worcester, his preaching, 


Pippin's friendship for him, 40 


3^ 


Eadgar, King, 53 


Edinburgh, its foundation, 19 


his laws, 54 


becomes capital of the Scotch kings, 53 


the ^theling, placed on the English 


Edinburgh Review started, 806 


throne, 77 


Edmund ; see Eadmund 


submits to the Conqueror, ib. 


Edmundsbury, St., 44 


joins the Danes, 78 


"Jews' Houses" at, 83 


takes refuge in Scotland, 79 


growth of, 90, 91 


establishes a king there, 87 


Edward ; for the pre-Norman kings, see Ead- 


Eadmer, his life of Anselm, 114 


ward 


Eadmund, King of East Anglia, murder of, 44 


Edward, son of IMargaret, made King of Scot- 


Eadmund Ironside, his struggles and death, 61 


land, 87 


Eadric of Mercia, murder of, by Cnut, 61 


Edward Che First of England, his youth, i6i 


Eadward the Elder, 50 


his conquest of Wales, 160—163 


his conquests, ib. 


his relations to modern England, 163 


chosen king by the Scots, 180 


to Parliaments, 164 


Eadward the Martyr, crowned by Dunstan, 56 


his judicial reforms, 164, 165 


murdered, ib. 


his legislation, 166, 171 


the Confessor, made king, 64 


his Parliaments, 171 — 175 


his favour to the Normans, 65 


his personal character, 175 — 177 


struggle with Godwine, ib 


his relations with Scotland, 178 


his death, 66 


his conception of kingship, 195 


stor^T- of his promise to Duke William, 74 


his treatment of the Jews and the clergy, 


Eadwigthe Fair, his marriage, 53 


198, 199 


banishes Dunstan, ib. 


his death, 200 


revolts against him, ib. 


Edward the Second, his relations with the 


Eadmund Ironsides' brother, murdered by 


Barons, 200, 201 


Cnut, 61 _ 


his truce with Bruce, 203 


Eadwine, an exile from Northumbria, 17 


his vices and fall, ib. 


comes to the Northumbrian throne, 18, 19 


Edward the Third, his election, 204 


his reign and death, 20 


his arrest of Mortimer, 208 


of Mercia, supports Eadgar the ^theling, 


progress during his reign, 212 — 214 


n 


effect of his accession, 217, 218 


submits to William, 78 


his relations with Flanders and Fraiice, 


Ealdhelm, Bishop, his songs, 47 


217—224 


Ealdormen, 4 


with Parliament, 224—228 



830 



INI 



Edward the Black Prince, his share in the 
struggles against John of Gaunt, 226, 22.7 
Edward the Fourth, his election, 279 

his marriage, deposition, and restoration, 
280 — 282 

his position as a king, 283 — 287 

his character, 286 
Edward the Fifth, 293 
Edward the Sixth, 351 — 354 
Egypt ; see Buonaparte 

evacuation of, its effects, 795 
Eleanor, wife of De Montfort, 148 

wife of Edward the First, 162, 176 
Elfege, importance of his life, 114 
Eliot, Sir John, his first election, 471 

his position in the early struggle agaiust 
Charles the First, 482 

his attacks on Buckingham, 483. 484 

his arrest, ib, 

moves the Short Remonstrance, 487 

his opinion of Buckingham, 488 

his work the source of the Grand Remon- 
strance, 489 
Elizabeth, Queen, state of England at her ac- 
cession, 362 

her appearance and character, 362—367 

her policy, 368—371 

effect of her policy ; see England 

her ecclesiastical policy, 400, 401 

her last days, 445, 446 

her " tuning the pulpits,'* 449 

immorality of her court, 473 
Ely, Abbey of, founded, 32 

burnt by Danes, 44 
England, Old, its origin, i, 2 

character of its inhabitants and laws, 2—5 
England, Literature of, how affected by Alfred, 
48 

poverty of, under Harold, 66 

how it explains the position of the country 
in time of John, 113 

between Chaucer and Caxton, 287 — 289 

its revival under Elizabeth, 390 — 393 

effect of Tyndale and Coverdale on, 447, 
4>t8 
England, Church of; see Church of England 

language of, progress of, in time of Edward 
the Third, 212 
England, New, its position after war between 

United States and England, 808 
Eorl, in Early England, 3, 4 
Episcopacy ; see Pym, Hampden 
Erasmus, his visit to England, 299 — 301 

his " Praise of Folly," 301 
Essex, first colonization of, by English, 14 
Essex, Earl of, Elizabeth's favour to, 366 

his insurrection, 426 

his failure in Ireland. 444 
Essex, Earl of, in Long Parliament, appointed 

leader of Parliamentary forces, 530 

his policy, 531, 533 

raises siege of Gloucester, 533 
Essex, Earl of, in Charles the Second's time, 
takes office, 638 

his policy, 641, 643 

his death, 646 
Ethel weard, his exceptional position in our 

literature, 113 
Eugene of Savoy, his success at Cremona, 693 
his union with Marlborough, 693, 694 



piuiest ol Marlowe against it, 421 

gives way before Puritanism, 427 ; see also 
Lyly 
Eustace of Boulogne, his strife with burghers 
of Dover, 65 

his aid sought by men of Kent against 
Normans, 78 
Eustace " the Monk," 327 
Evesham, origin of, 31 

battle of ; see Battles 
Examiner, the, written by Bolingbroke, 697 
Exchequer, Court of, its work under Henry 

the First, 93 
Excise Bill, 710, 711 
Exclusion Bill, 632 
Exeter, siege of, by the Danes, 44, 45 

takes active part against the Normans, 78 

besieged by the English, 78 

relieved by Fitz-Osbern, 79 

welcomes the Barons, 123 



Fabvan, his Chronicle, 283 
Fagius, burning of his bones, 361 
Fairfax, General, his first appointment by 
Parliament, 531 
effect on him of the king's treason, 552 
raises the cry of a free Parliament, 582 
Falkirk, battle of ; see Battles 
Falkland, Lord, his character, 525 
his views on Church Reform, 526 
leaves Parliament after the refusal of 

Hotham, 530 
his death, 533 
his theology, 591 
Farmer-class, rise of, 239 
Fastolf, Sir John, his patronage of Caxton. 

292 
Fawkes, de Breaute, his rebellion, 138 

Guy ; see Gunpowder Plot 
Ferrars, Bishop of St. David's, execution of, 

359 
Feudalism, introduced by William the First, 
80 
effect of, on England, 81, 82 
relation of universities to, 131, 132 
ruined by Wars of Roses, 283 
Edward's relations to, 197 — 199 
Finch, Chief-Justice, his opinion on Hampden's 
case, 514 
his flight, 521 
Fisher, Bishop, his favour to Erasmus, 908 

his answer to Luther, 916 
Fitz-Neal, his book on the Exchequer, 114 
Fiiz-Osbern, Roger, rebels against William, 84 
Fitz-Osbern, William, is left in charge of 
England by William the First, 77 
relieves Exeter, 79 
receives grant of manors, 81 
Fitz-Osbert ; see William Longbeard 
Fitz-Ralf, Archbishop, his attack on Friars, 

231 
Fitz-Thomas, chosen mayor, 194 
Fitzurse ; see Beket, death of 
Fitz-W alter, Captain of the City of London, 
90 
Marshal of the Army of God and the Holy 

Church, 123 
taken prisoner, 126 



INDEX. 



831 



Fitz-Warren, Fulk, drives Martin from Eng- 
land, 142 
Fitz-William family, rise of, from spoil of 

monasteries, 342 
Five Mile Act, 611, 612 
Flamsteed, the astronomer, 599 
Flanders, relations of Edward the Third to, 
218, 219 
Caxton educated in, 289 
importance of its trade to England, 381 
Fleetwood, resigns his command to Cromwell, 
578 
remonstrates against the dissolution of 

1657, 579 
his conduct during the second Protectorate, 
582 
Fletcher, contrasted with Ben Jonson, 428 
Flood, Henry, his support of Irish independ- 
ence, 789 
Florence, of Worcester, as an authority, 49, 

59,78 
Florence, poets of, 133, 143 

her relation to letters in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, 298 
Folk, greater and lesser, in towns, 193, 194 
Fontainebleau, treaty of, 799 
Ford contrasted with Ben Jonson, 428 
Forest laws, the, enacted by Cnut, 62 
Fortescue, Sir John, his doctrine about Eng- 
lish monarchy, 283 ; see also 297 
Foxe, John, his " Book of Martyrs," 39^ 
Fox, Bishop, his favour to Erasmus, 308 

his favour to Wolsey, 316 
Fox, George, his prophecy of Cromwell's death, 

580 
Fox, Charles James, his opinion of Pitt, 763 
his coalition with Lord North, 764 
his India Bill, 764 
his policy towards France, 767 
his enthusiasm at fall of Bastille, 774 
his intrigues about the Regencj^, 774 
his opinion of Burke, 776 
his Libel Act, 779 
his support of France, 783 
George the Third's dislike of, 796 
his ministry, 798 
his death, 798 
France, early history of; see Lewis the Nintb, 
Edward the Third, Henry the Filth, 
Joan of Arc, Lewis the Fourteenth, 
Lewis the Fifteenth, Voltaire, Rousseau 
States-General in, 774 
fall of the Bastille in, 774 
attitude of English statesmen towards ; see 

Pitt, Fox, Burke 
declares war against Austria, 781 
declares war on England, 782 
character of its government during Revo- 
lution, 781 
war with England ; see Pitt ; see also 
Buonaparte, Wellington 
Francis, of Assisi, his life, 144 
Francis the First of France, Henry the Eighth's 
• friendship for, 316 
his interference with the University of 
Paris, 328 
Franklin, Benjamin, Whitfield's eflfect on, 718 
Franks, relations of, with England, 40, 41 
Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George the 
Second, 713 



Frederic the Second, Emperor, how regarded 

in Europe, 133 
Frederick the Second of Prussia, seize* Silesia. 
715 

his second war, 723 

his Seven Years' War, 727 

his opinion of Pitt, 728 

Pitt's assistance to him, 740 

Pitt's opinion of him, 731 

his despair at Pitt's fall, 742 

his administrative reform, 773 
Freeman, the, sinks into the villein, 55 
French influences on Edward the First, 176— 

^78 
Friars, eftect on English universities, 133, 
146, 147 

work of, in towns, 145, 146 

their struggle against learning, 146 

position in the Barons' war, 147 

attacked by Fitz-Ralf and Wyclif. 231 
Frisia, Boniface in, 37 
Frisian, the story told of, by Bede, 13 
Krith Gilds, 189, 190 
Frobisher, Elizabeth's favour to, 366 

his discoveries, 491 
Froissart, his view of chivalry ; see Chivalry 

his picture of Edward at Poitiers, 222 — 2>>4 
Fulc, the Red, second Count of Anjou, 95 

the Good, third Count, ib. 

the Black, his cruelty, 95, 96 

of Jerusalem, 97 

Gage, General, made governor of Massachu- 
setts, 755 

Galileo, a contemporary of Bacon, 597 

Gall, St., 17 

Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, 348 

Garnet the Jesuit, 463 

Gauden, Dr., writes the " Eikon Basilike," 556 

Gaunt, Elizabeth, executed, 651 

Gaunt, John of, invades France, 226 / 
leads the Barons, 227 ^ 

despises the Commons, 227 ' 

relations of, with Wyclif, 231 
flies from insurgents, in 1381, 245 
his claim on the Spanish crown, 254 

Gaveston, Piers, his character and career, 201, 
202. 

Gay, his opinion of politicians, 742 

Geoffrey, Martel, Count of Anjou, 72 
his death, 73 -^^ 

compared with his father, 97 

Geoffrey Grey-gown, his loss of power, 95 
of Anjou, how treated by his father, 96 
of Monmouth, his history, 115, 161 

George the First, his position contrasted with 
that of William and Mary and of Anne, 

673 
results of his accession, 704 
George the Second, his hatred of Walpole, 712 
guided by his wife, 712 
supports Carteret, 723 
George the Third, effects of his rule, 740, 741 
his character and policy, 741, 742 
* his treatment of the House of Commons, 
744 
his despotic rule, 749 
his opposition to Catholic Emancipation, 

794 
his death, 813 



832 



INDEX, 



George the Fourth, accession of, 813 

his attack on his wife, 813 
Gerald de Barri, his position in literature, 116 

his work, 116. 117 
Geraidines, the, in Ireland, 435, 436 
Gilford, Bona venture, a Roman Catholic, 

President of Magdalene College, 654 
Gilds, 189—193 

Gildas, his account of the state of Britain, 11 
Ginkell, General, 677 
Girondins, their aim, 780 
Gladstone, Mr., his ministry, 8ig 
Glanvill, Ranulf de, takes the King of Scot- 
land prisoner, 106 

his treatise on law, 114 
Glastonbury monastery, founded by Ini, 35 

Dunstan born at, 51 

Dunstan, Abbot of, 52 

Arthur's tomb at, 115 
G'encoe, massacre of, 670 
Glendower, Owen, his rising, 259 
Gloucester, Earl of, Gilbert de Clare, his rela- 
lations with the Barons' party, 150, 153, 
154- 
Gloucester, Duke of, uncle of Richard the 

Second, 254 
Gloucester, Duke Humphrey, his regency, 269 

his relations with Jacqueline of Brabant,- 
269 

his death, 274 

his seizure of the bjoks at the Lou-vre, 
292 
Gloucester, Richard, Duke of; siee Richard tha 

Third. 
Goderich, Lord, forms a ministry on Canning's" 

principles, 813 
Godolphin, ids rise, 690, 691 

his fall. 700 
GcdA^ine, his rise, 63 

Earl of Wessex, 63 

his ability and policy, 64 

his wise rule, 64 

his struggle with Eadward, 65 

his exile, 65 

his return and death, 65 
Gondomar, 477, 478 
Cjoodman, Bishop, dies a papist, 496 
Go^er, his. position as a poet, 287 
Grattan, Henry, his opposition to Pitt's finan- 
cial policy, 771 

his support of Irish independence, 791 
Cireene, 420, 422, 423 

Greenvil, a leader ot Cornish Royalists, 532 
Greenway the Jesuit, 463 

Gregory the Great, his interview with the 
English slaves, 17 

sends Augustine to England, 17 

his pastorals translated by Alfred, 48 
Gregory the Seventh, his struggle with William 

the First, 82 
Grenviile. why he lost America, 739 

his dislike of Pitt, 745 

comes into office, 745, 746 

his prosecution of Wilkes, 746 
Grenville, Lord, his opinion of state of England, 
784 

refuses to take office without Fox, 796 

comes into office, 798 

dislikes slave trade, 798, 799 

driven from office, 7qq 



Gre}^ Lady Jane, her marriage, 354 

her reign, 354 

her death, 355, 356 
Grey, Lord, his Reform Bill, 814 

his other reforms, 815 
Grimbald, Alfred's employment of, 48 
Grindecobbe, 246, 247 
Grocyn, fellow ot New College, 298 — 301 
Grosseteste, his advice to Bacon, 135 

dies at feud with Rome, 143 

his CoYistitutions, 144 

his correspondence with De Montfort, 149 - 
Grotius, his account of English theology, 449 I 
Grow, helps to found vegetable physiology, | 

599 - 
Gunpowder Plot, 463, 464 
Gurdon, Adam, Edward the First's struggle 

with, 179 
Guthlac, Abbot of Crowland, 31, 32 
Guthriim. the Dane, becomes King of East 
Anglia, 44 

iElfred makes peace with, 45 
Guy, of Amiens, his poem as an authority, 70 
Gwalchmai, his song, 159 
Gwyn, Nell, Charles the Second's request to 

James about, 649 
Gyrth, son of Gcdwine, kiHed at battle of 
Senlac, 76 



Habeas Corpus ACt ; ^£'«? Stsitutes 
Haie, Sir Matthew, appointed to reform the 
law, 561, 566 

introduces a bill for Church Comprehen- 
sion, 608 
Hales, a Latitudinarian, 464, 6oor, 601 
Hales, Sir Edward, 652 
Halifax, Lord, on Monmouth's succession, 641 

on Exclusion Biil, 643 

on Limilatipn Bill, G45 

advice to Charles after passing H. C. Act. 
648 

his dismissal, 652 

presents crown to William the Third, 668 
Hall, Bishop, his satires, 511 
Hallam, his opinion of Shakspere, 426 

of the law of conspiracy, 522 

of Charles the Second's position, 647 
H alley, investigates tides, &c., 599 
Hamilton, Marquis of, as Royal Commissioner 

Jn Scotland, 516 
Hamilton, Duke of, rallies the Royalists against 
Argyle, 551, 552 

execution of, 556 
Hampden, his attitude towards Episcopacy, 
454, 455 

his refusal of the forced loan, 485 

his refusal to pay ship-money, 513 

his trial, 514, 515 

his tact in hindering a fight in the Com- 
mons, 526 

his death, 533 
Harding, character of his Chronicles, 288 
Hardy, trial of, 7S5 
Hargreaves, his invention of spinning-jenny, 

768 
Harley, Robert, comes into office, 695 

dismissed from office, 698 

his patronage of Mrs. Masham, 700 

his return to office, 700 



INDEX. 



833 



Harley — cont. 

his intrigues with the Pretender, 703 
their effects, 704 
Harold, King, Cnut's son, 63 
Harold, son of God wine. Earl of East Anglia, 65 
his statesmanship, 66 
his campaign in Wales, 66 
his accession, (^^ 
his oath to Duke William, 74 
his preparations for the struggle with 

William, 75 
defeats Harold Hardrada at Stamford 

Bridge, 75 
his death in battle of Senlac, 76 
effect of his victories in Wales, 158 
Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, invades 
England, 75 
is defeated at Stamford Bridge, 75 
Harrison, General, his share in dissolution of 
the Rump, 563, 564 
his execution, 606 
Harvey, his opinion of Bacon, 595 

his discovery, 597 
Haselrig, attempted arrest of, 527 
accused of corruption, 561 
opposition of, to dissolution of Parliament 

in favour of Council of State, 563 
returned to the Parliament of 1654, 568 
his attitude in it, 569 

excluded from the Parliament of 1657, 577 
demands the dismissal of Fleetwood and 
Lambert, 581 
Hastings ; see Battles 
Hastings, Danish leader, 49 
Hastings, Warren, good side of his policy, 759, 
760 
severe side, 760, 761 
his impeachment, 765, 766 
its effect, 766 

attitude of Pitt towards him, 766, 767 
effect of his trial, 792 
Hastings, Lord, his death, 293 
Harthacnut, King, 63 

his crimes and lawlessness, 63 
Havelock, Sir Henry, 818 
Heahmund, Bishop of Sherborne, 44 
Hengest, lands in Kent, 7 

his death, ib. 
Henry of Huntingdon, as an authority, 33 
Henry of Blois, as papal legate, 99 
Henry the First of England, makes terms with 
clergy, 87 
seizes the crown, 87 
his relations to the English, 87 
his character, 87 
his marriage, 87 
his simony, 91 

his invasion of Normandy, 92, 93 
Henry the Second of England, his character, 
loi, 102 
his policy, 102 

his struggle with Beket, 103 — 105 
his legal reforms, 103, 105 — 108 
his death, 108 

his treatment of Ireland, 431 — 433 
Henry the Third of England, his coronation, 
^ 126 

rise of universities in his time, 127 
his relations with Hubert de Burgh, 139 
refuses justice to Londoners, 140 



Henry the Third — cont. 

his quarrel with the Earl Mareschal, 141 

his alliance with the Pope, 142 
Henry the Fourth of France, his energy, 462 

his conversion, ib. 

his opinion of James the First, 465 

good effects of his policy, 657 
Henry the Fourth of England, his insurrection 
against Richard the Second, 256, 257 

his accession, 257 

his policy towards the Church, 258, 259 

his struggle in Wales, 259 

his death, 260 
Henry the Fifth, his persecution of the Lol- 
lards, 260 

his conquest of France, 260 — 264 

effect of his death, 267 
Henry the Sixth, effect of his long minority, 265 

restrictive act passed under ; see Com- 
mons, House of 

his illness and recovery, 'Z'jS—ztj 

causes of his fall, 277, 278 

his restoration, 281 

his death, 282 
Henry the Seventh, his position as a sovereign, 
295, 296 

his foreiijn policy, 302 ; see also Ireland 
Henry the Eighth, his accession, 301 

his marriage, 302 

his foreign policy, 302, 303 

his sympathy with Colet, 307 

his favour to More, 310 

his despotic policy, 314 — 319 ; see also 
Ireland 

his book against Luther, 315 

circumstances of his divorce, 321 — 323 

Wolsey's view of his character, 324 

his claim to be head of the Church, 329 

his view about the translation of the Bible, 
.332 

his relations with Cromwell, 334 

his later career, 349, 350 

effect of his character on Elizabeth, 363 
Herbert, Lord, in Parliament of 1654, 569 
Herbert Wake-dog, Count of Touraine, 97 
Herbert, George, as a clergyman, 399 
Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, afriendofHobbes 

602 
Herford, Nicholas, a follower of Wyclif, 233 
Herluin of Brienne, founds Abbey of Bee, 68 
Hexham, priors of, historians of Stephen's 

reign, 113, 114 
Heywood, a successor of Shakspere, 425 
High Court of Commission ; see Commission, 

High Qourt of 
Hild, founds Whitby monastery, 26 
Hobbes, Thomas, his first works on Govern- 
ment, 591 

his career and works, 602 — 604 
Hoby, Sir Edward, his complaint, 397 
Holland, indignation in, at Charles the First's 
death, 555 

war with, after Restoration, 615, 616 

hatred of Lewis the Fourteenth for, 62^5. 

remonstrance of Lewis the Fourteenth with, 
626, 627 

alliance of, with England on behalf of 
Turkey, 775 

absorbed by PVench Republic, 794 
Holland, Lord, execution of, 557 



3 H 



834 



INDEX. 



Holies, attempted arrest of, 527 

his leadership of the Presbyterians, 547 
his expulsion from Parliament, 549 
Hooke improves the microscope, 599 
Hooker, Richard, as a clergyman, 399 
as a writer, 413 

his ecclesiastical polity, 456, 457 
Hooper, execution of, 359 
Hopton. Sir Ralph, a Royalist leader, 532 
Horsa, coming of, 7 

death of, 9 
Home Tooke, his trial, 785 
Horner helps to edit "Edinburgh Review," 806 
Horsted, its historical importance, 9 
Hotham, Sir John, his refusal to admit the 

king to Hull, 530 
Hotspur ; see Northumberland 
Hough, President of Magdalen College, 654 
Hounslow, James's camp at, 652 
Howard, Admiral Lord, 410 
Howard, Lord, in Charles the First's time, pre- 
sents petition for peace with Scotland, 
517 
Howard, John, 721, 722 
Howe, John, 609 

refuses Declaration of Indulgence, 655 
Howe, General, 755, 756, 757 
Howel Dhu, laws of, 158 
Hubert, Walter, effect of his death, 119 

his execution of William Longbeard, 194 
Hubert de Eurgh, resists Lewis of France, 126 
his character as a ruler, 137 
opposes the Earl of Chester, 137, 138 
his fall, 138, 139 
Huguenots, relations of Elizabeth of England 

to, 406, 407 
Huskisson, 813 

Hussey, Lord, his view of affairs in Henry the 
Eighth's reign, 337 
his execution, 338 
Hutchinson, Colonel, account of him by his 
wife, 449 — 451 
Mrs., her denunciation of James's court, 
473 
Hyde, Edward, brings in a bill for makmg 
Long Parliament perpetual, 524 
joins the Royalist cause, 525 
issues State Papers for the king. 529 
leaves Parliament after the resistance of 
Hotham to Charles, 530 ; see Clarendon 
defeats Hales's bill for Church Comprehen- 
sion, 608 

Independents, their assertion of freedom of 

belief, 610 
India, French empire in, 726 

conquest of, by England ; see Clive 
reforms in ; see Clive 

Regulation Act \ see Statutes ; see also 
Hastings (Warren) and Burke (Edmund) 
bills for government of; see Fox, Pitt 
(William the younger), Tippoo Sahib, 
Wellesley, Battles 
saved by Convention of Cairo, 795 
effect of Affghan war upon, 816 
the mutiny and its results, 817, 818 
Ingulf of Croyland, his work a forgery, 78 
Ini, King of Wessex, 34, 35 
Innocent the Third, his position, 119 
his relations with Joau. 120 



Innocent the Third — cojit. 

his suspension of Langton, 125 
lona, monastery of, founded by Columba, 22 

receives the exiles from St. Aidan's, 28 
Ireland, revolts in, their effect on Spenser's 

life, 417 
circumstances of its conquest in the 

twelfth century, 431 — 433 
struggles there, after the conquest by 

Strongbow, 434, 435 
treatment of, by Henry the Seventh and 

Eighth, 435—437 
effect of the Reformation in, 438 — 440 
of the Catholic reaction, 440 — 443 
conquest of, by Elizabeth, 443 — 445 
treatment of, by Strafford ; see Wentworth 
Charles the First appeals to, against Eng- 
land, 534—536 
Cromwell's conquest of; see Cromwell, 

Drogheda, Wexford 
effect on, of Charles the Second's policy, 

619 
William's conquest of, 677 
its soldiers, attempt of James the Second 

to enrol them in his army, 665 
asserts its independence in 1782, 761 
England's difficulty in Pitt's time, 771 
rising in, in 1798, 786 
its position under the Georges, 787, 788 
its state durmg the time of independence, 

789, 790 
union of, with England ; see Pitt ; see aiso 

Grattan, Flood 
Church of, 21, 22 

its relation to the English Church, 22 
effect on, of the Synod of Whitby, 28, 29 
Ireton, General, inclines to the Independents. 

546. 
his attitude towards the king, 549, 550 
his share in the conquest of Ireland, 572 
his body taken from the grave, 608 
Ironsides, their effect on the army, 547 — 549 ; 

see also Cromwell 
Isidore, Bishop, extracts of Bede from, 38 
Italy, rise of, 818 

Jacqueline of Brabant ; see Gloucester, Duke 

Humphrey 
Jacobins led at first by the Girondins, 780 
their subsequent success and crimes, 783 
their fall, 784 ^ 
Jacobites, the, their plots against William the 
Third, 687 
against Anne, 697 
decline of their power under George the 

First, 704 
their insurrection in 1715, 706, 707 
intrigued with by Cardinal Alberoni, 707 
Jaenberht, Archbishop, his plot, 40 
James the First, his view of divine right of 
kings, 464 — 466 
of bishops, 466 

his relations to Parliament, 467—472, 478 
to the judges, 472, 473 
to his favourites, 474 
to Europe, 474—476 
to Bacon, 593 
James the Second, when Duke of York, made 
Lord Admiral 605 ; see York, James 
Duke of 



[NDEX. 



835 



fames the Second — continued. 

popular opinion of his character, 649 

serviUty of his first Parhament, ib. 

his approval of cruelties after Sedgmoor, 

650, 651 
his relations with Lewis the Fourteenth, 

651 
fills his army with Roman Catholic officers, 

652 
his attacks on the Church, 652, 653 
his struggle with the bishops, 656—658 
his flight and deposition, 666— 668 
James, Wilham, a Lollard, 235 
Jarrow, the monk of ; see Baeda 
Jeffrey, edits Edinburgh Review, 806 
Jeffreys, Judge, his "Bloody Circuit," 650, 
651 
his advice about the Seven Bishops, 656 
Jenkins, his ear, 713 
Jesuits, their success in England, 401 ; see 

Campian and Parsons 
Jews, their relations with William the First, 
83 
their position in England at the Conquest, 

ib. 
persecutions of, 198 _ * 

banished by Edward the First, 199 
restored by Cromwell, 573 
Joan of Arc, career of, 268 — 273 
Jocelyn, Bishop of Wells under John, gi 
John, the old Saxon, 48 

John, King of England, his conspiracy against 
Henry the Second, 108 
his treachery to Richard, 109 
his character and policy, it^, 119 
his attitude towards the Pope, 119, 120 
his attitude towards the nobles, 120, 121 
his reception of the demands of the nobles, 

123 

his attitude after Magna Charta, 125 

his death, 126 

his treatment of Ireland, 433, 434 
fohnson, Samuel, a friend of Burke's, 775 
Johnston of Warriston suggests the renewal of 

the Covenant, 515 
Jonson, Ben, his account of Spenser's death, 
417 

his view of Shakspere's character, 422 

of his readiness in writing, ib. 

" Every Man in his Humour," 424 

succeeds Shakspere as king of the stage, 
428 

his estimate of Bacon, 593, 594 

friendship for Hobbes, 602 
Joseph the Second of Austria, motive and 
character of his policy, 768 

his death, 775 
Justiciar, appointment of, 93 
Junto, the Whig, 682 
Junius, prosecution of, 746 

his letters, 750 
Jutes, their position in England, i, 2 

their invasion of England, 7 

their Kentish kingdom ; see Kent 
Juxon, Bishop, made Treasurer, 496 

Kebel, execution of, 91 
Kent, rise of kingdom of, 17 

struggles with Northumbria, ib. 

insurrection of, against Mercia, 40 



Kent — continued. 

subjection of, to Wessex, 41, 42 
revolts against Odo of Bayeux, 78 
Kent, Earl of, his execution, 208 
Kepler, a contemporary of Bacon, 597 
Killiecrankie, battle of, 670 
Killigrew, his rebuke to Charles the Second,6o6 
Kingship, English, change in its character, 55 
KnoUes, his history of the Turks, 391 
Knollys, his opinion of Mary Stuart, 376 
Knox, his resistance to Mary, 376 

Labourdonnais, General, in India, 733 
Labourers, Statutes of; see Peasantry 
Lall}^ General, his defeat, 758 
Lambert, General, employed by Fairfax, 551, 

resigns his commission to Cromwell, 578 
his conduct after Cromv/ell's death, 582 
excepted from the general pardon, 6c6 
Lambeth, treaty of, 127 

Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, his relations with 
Gaveston, 201, 202 
his defeat and death, 202, 203 
Lancaster, Duke of; see Gaunt, John of 
Lancaster, House of; see Henry the Fourtii, 

Fifth, and Sixth 
Land, tenure of, by Norman barons after Con- 
quest, 81 
Lanfranc, of Pavia, enters the Abbey of Bee. 
68 
opposes Wniiam. 73 
banished from Normand^', ib. 
becomes William's chief adviser, 74 
summoned to England, 82 
his reforms ; see Church of England 
assists Rufus to gain the crovvn, 85 
effect of his death, 86 
Langton, Stephen, 119, 120, 123 

his suspension from his archbishopric, 125 
his attitude in Henry the Third's rei.f.:n, 
137. 138 
Langton, Simon, his advice to the Barons. 126 
Langton, Walter, Bishop of Worcester, 304 
Latimer, Lord, removed from oftice, 22S 
Latimer, Hugh, studies at Padua, 304 
his autobiography^, 320, 343 
his preaching, 344 
his first arrest, 344 
made Bishop of Worcester, 345 
his treatment of a figure of the Virgin, 345, 

imprisoned and deposed, 347 
arrested under Six Articles Act, 349 
imprisoned on Mary's accession, 354 
his execution, 359 

Latitudinarians, growth of, 599 — 602 

Laud, his intolerance, 458 
his list of ministers, 481 
his character and policy, 404 — 49S 
his treatment of Scotland, 507 — 510 
his feelings about "Thorough," 513 
his courage, 514 
imprisonment of, 521 
check on his power, 609 

Lauderdale, Lord, his rule in Scotland, 619 

Lauzun, his taunt against the Irish defenders 
of Limerick, 677 

Law, Roman, its influences in Edward the 
First's reign, 177 

H 7 



ii5^ 



INDEX. 



Laws, the, as an authority, 49, 59 

Lay.amon, his poem, 117 

Legh, commissioner about the monasteries, 333 

Leicester, Earl of ; see Montfort, Simon de 

Leicester, Earl of, Elizabeth's favourite, 363,367 

Leighton the Puritan, 512 

Lennox, Duke of, presents petitions against 

English Prayer Book in Scotland, 514 
Lenthall, his answer to Charles the First, 528 
Leo the Tenth, his election, 304, 305 

his view of Luther, 314 
Leopold, the Emperor, interferes against France, 

780 
Leofwine, son of Godwin, 76 
Leslie, General, takes command of Scotch 
forces, 516 
conduct at Dunbar, 559 
taken prisoner at Worcester, 573 
Lewes, battle of ; see Battles 
Lewis the Seventh of France, his struggle with 

Henry the Second, 102 
Lewis, son of Philip Augustus, afterwards Lewis 
the Eighth, his invasion of England, 126 
his retreat from England, 128 
Lewis the Ninth, his decision about the Pro- 
visions of Oxford, 151 
his influence on Edward the First, 178 
Lewis the Fourteenth, his indignation at 
William of Orange's marriage, 635 
his pensions to Charles the Second, ib. 
eftect on his position of the treaty of Nime- 

guen, ib. 
his relations with James the Second, 651 
his revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 651, 

652 
his character, 658 
his policy, 659, 660 
his war against the allies, 668, 669 
his intrigues about the Spanish succession, 

686—688 
his treachery to William the Third, 688 ; 
see also Holland, William of Orange, 
Arlington, Dover, treaty of 
Lewis the Fifteenth, the freedom of opinion in. 

France under him, 773 
Lewis the Sixteenth, convokes the States- 
General, 774 
accepts the Constitution, 775 
flies from Paris, 780 
his imprisonment, 781 
his death, 782 
Lewis the Eighteenth, his flight from Paris, 

809 
Leyton, Commissioner of Monasteries, 333 
Lilburne, John, 543, 557 
FJlla saves Eadwine from a murderer, 19 
Lilly, an Oxford scholar, 305 
Limerick, siege of, 677 
Linacre of Oxford, 298 — 30T 
Lincoln, in time of Romans, 5 
Jews' houses at, 81 
Stephen defeated at, 98 
welcomes the Barons, 123 
Lincoln, Bishop of, his relations witL University 

of Oxford, 132 
Lindisfarne, bishopric of, 22 

desertion of it by Colman, 28 
Cuthbert becomes its bishop, 33 
its historical importance, 34 
Lisle. Lady, executed, 651 



Literature, English ; see England, literature of 
Literature, Welsh, .in twelfth and thirteenth 

centuries, 155—157, 159, 160 
Liverpool, Lord, his ministry, 804, 805 
Livery companies ; see Companies, Livery 
Llewellyn of Wales, /lis alliance with Faukes 

de Breaute, 138 
Llewellyn-ap-Jowerth, his struggles for inde- 
pendence, 159 — 162 
Llewellyn-ap-Gruffydd, his struggles for inde- 
pendence, 159 — 162 
Llywarch Hen ; see Literature, Welsh 
Locke, John, his pohtical teaching, 603, 604 
Lollardry, revival of, and its suppression, 216 

meaning of name, 235 

struggle of, 235, 236 

later phases of, 251 — 253 

protection of, by Richard the Second, 255 

persecution of, by Henry the Fourth and 
Henry the Fifth, 258, 259 

state of, in Henry the Sixth's reign, 267, 268 

signs of its extinction, 275 

persecution of, its effect on Henry the 
Sixth, 277 

effect on of Oldcastle's execution, 342 
Lothian becomes abode of Scotch kings, 53 
London, its early commerce, 5 

plundered by Danes, 42 

relations of Normans and French to, 88, 89 

shares in the religious revival of the twelfth 
century, 92 

welcomes Stephen, 97, 98 

supports him, 98 

welcomes the Barons, 123 

faithful to Protestantism on Mary's acces- 
sion, 354 

its sympathy with the Long Parliament, 
526—529 
London, John of, a pupil of Roger Bacon, 134 
Londonderry, foundation of, 445 

siege of, 672, 673 
Longchamp, William, Bishop of Ely, makes aq* 
alliance between Otho and Richard, 109 '\ 
Longland, William, his history, 248, 249 

his poem, 249, 250 
Lords, House of, weakened by suppression of 

mitred abbots, 341 ; see also Parliament 
Louis Philippe, 814 
Luddites, riots of, 812 
Luneville, treaty of, 794 
Luther, his change of attitude, 314 

his relation to the Revival of Letters, 315 

reception of his doctrines in England, ib.; 
see Leo, More 

advises Tyndale to translate the Bible, 342 
Ludlow, General, his share in the conquest of 

Ireland, 572 
Luttrell, Colonel, 750 
Lydgate, his character as a poet, 288 
Lyly, his " Euphues," 392 . i 

Lyons, William, removed from court, 228 
Lyttelton leaves Long Parliament, 530 

Mabinogi, 156 

Mackay, General, his struggle against Dundee, 

670 
Mackintosh, Sir James, his exclamation about 

the state of Europe under Buonaparte. 

796, 
helps in Edinburgh Review^ 806 



INDEX. 



837 



Magdalene College ; see Parker, GifFord, 

Hough, etc. _ ^ 

Maine submits to Duke William, 73 
Major-Generals, Cromwell's, 577 
Malcolm, his submission to William the First, 80 

to Rufus, 87 
Malger, Archbishop of Rouen, 73 
Malpighi, helps to found vegetable physiology, 

599 
Malta, treatment of, by England, 795 
Man conquered by Eadwine, i5 
Manchester, its Toryism in 1745, 725 
Manchester, Earl of, leads parliamentary 
forces, 533 , . ^ ^ , 

Cromwell quarrels with, 536; see also 
Cromwell 
Mandeville, Lord, a leader of the Presby- 
terians, 526 
Manny, Walter de, 221, 222, 241 
Mansel, a royal favourite of Henry the Third, 

144 
Mantes, burning of, by William the First, 85 
Manton, his scheme of Protestant compre- 
hension, 623 
Mareschal, Earl William, his power on death 

of John, 126 
Mareschal, Earl Richard, his resistance to 

Henry, 141 
Margaret of Anjou, her marriage, 276 
Marlborough, Duke of, his exploits 5n Ireland, 
677 
his plots against William the Third, 679 
his early career and character, 688—690 
his rise in power under Anne, 690, 691 
wins Blenheim, 693, 694 
the rest of his career, 695 — 700 
his opinion of Walpole, 701 
Marlborough, Duchess of, her influence over 
Anne, 689, 690 
over her husband, ib. 
Marlowe, 420, 421 
Marmont, Marr.hal, 804 

Marsh, Adam, his reputation as a scholar, 146 
his relations to Grosseteste and de Mont- 
fort, 147 
Marshall, a Presbyterian minister, 526 
Marston, a successor of Shakspere, 425 
Marston Moor ; see Battles 
Martin, Henry, 557, 564 
Martin Marprelate, 460 
Martin, a Papal legate driven from England, 

141, 142 
Martyrs ; see Latimer, Taylor, Ridlej'-, Cran- 

mer, etc. 
Mart^T, Peter, burning of his bones, 361 
INIary Tudor, set aside by Edward, 353 
her marriage, 354 

her courage at the insurrection, 355, 356 
her policy, 356 
discontent with her rule, 361 
her death, 361 
Mary Stuart, her birth, effects of, 373 
her claims, ib. 
her character, 375 — 377 
her marriage and its effects, 378—380 
her career in England, 381 — 384 
her death, 407 — 409 
Mary de Medicis, her position in France, 404 
Mary, wife of William the Third, the hopes of 
Whigs from her. 657 



Masham, Mrs., 700 

Massachusetts, attacks on the liberty of, 753 

Massena, Marshal, 801 

Massinger contrasted with Ben Jonson, 428 

Massey made Dean of Christ Church, 653, 654 

Matilda of Flanders, her marriage, 73 

dispute about it with the Pope, ib. 
Matilda, wife of Henry the First, 87,' 88 
Maud, Henry's daughter, loved by him, 94 

her struggle with Stephen, 98, 99 
Maurice, Prince, his successes in Devonshire, 

533 

Maurilius takes the place of Malger as Arch- 
bishop of Rouen, 73 

May, .his account of the atrocities of the Irish, 

524 
May-flozver, the, its voyage, 492 
Mayne, Cuthbert, execution of, 40 
Mazarin, Cardinal, his alliance with Cromwell, 

576 
Medina Sidonia, leads the Armada, 410, 411 
Melbourne, Lord, his ministry, 815 
Mellitus, Bishop of London, 20 
Melville, his treatment of James the First, 

508 
Mercia, colonization of, 15 
Paganism of, 20 
shakes off the overlordship of Northum- 

bria, 20, 21 
Chad's mission to, 24 
its conquests in time of Penda, 23 
effect on, of Theodore's arrangements. 30 
great progress of, in later part of seventh 

century, 30 — 32 
rise of, after fall of Northumbria, 34—36 
power of, under Offa, 39, 40 
its fall, 41, 42 

victories over Danes under iEthelred, 49 
its relations to Wales, 157, 158 
Meres, Francis, " Wit's Treasury'-," 424 

his opinion of Shakspere, 425 
Methodists, the, 720, 721 
Mexico, attack of France on, 818 
Middleton, as successor of Shakspere, 425 
Middle-English ; see English, their settlements 

in Britain 
Middlesex election ; see Wilkes, Luttrell 
Milton, John, his Puritanism, 451 — 459 
his early career, 510 
his first poems, 511, 512 
his relation to Spinoza, ih. 
his " Lycidas," 515 

his sonnet on Massacre of Vaudois, 575 
his career as illustrative of Puritanism, 

582—584 
"Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Re- 
gained," and " Samson Agonistes," 584 
—586 
efforts for freedom of the Press, 647 
Monasteries, rise of, in Northumbria, 25 
Monks, attacks of Erasmus, Colet, Thomas 

Cromwell, IMore on, 333, 334 
Monk, General, reduces the Highlands, 571 
circumstances of his restoration of Charles 
the Second, 582 
Monmouth, Duke of, brought forward by 
Shaftesbury^ 641 
his progress through the countrv, 643 
his arrest, 645 
his flight, 646 



SiS 



INDEX. 



Tslonmouth, Duke oi— continued. 

his insurrection, defeat, and death, 649, 650 
P.Ioore, Sir John, his career in Portugal, 800 
Montacute besieged, 78 

Tslontagu, his sermons before Parliament, 481 
Montagu, made Earl of Sandwich by Charles 

the Second, 605 
Montagu, a member of Whig Junto, 682 

becomes Chancellor of Exchequer, 683 

his financial reforms, 683 

driven from office, 685 
Montaigne, point of similarity between him 

and Shakspere, 428 
Montcalm, General, 736, 737 
Ivlonteagle, Lord, the letter to, 463 
Montesquieu, his account of religious state of 
England, 717 

his work in France, 773 
llontfort, Simon de, his relations to the Roman 
Church, 144 

the king's fear of him, 147, 148 

his career in Gascony, 148, 149 

his share in the Provisions of Oxford, 149, 
150 

his siege of Dover, 151 

the rest of his career, 152 — 154 

his admiration for Edward the First, 177 
Montgomery, minister of William, 81 

receives grants of manors, ib. 
Montrose, Earl of, his desertion of the patriots, 
524. 

organises a rising in favour of Charles the 
First, 534 

defeated by Argyle, 540, 541 
Moravians, Wesley's relations with, 720 
More, Mrs. Hannah, her account of absence 
of Bibles in England, 717 

effect of her writing, 721 
More, Sir Thomas, his allusion to Vespucci, 207 

his character, 300 

his opinion of Colet's school, 305 

his career, 308 — 310 

his " Utopia," 310 — 313 

his answer to Luther, 315, 316 

his opinion of Wolsey, 319 

as Chancellor, 326, 327 

his attacks on the monks, 333 

his death, 336, 337 

influence of his doctrines, 601 
Morkere of Northumbria, supports Edgar the 
Atheling, 77 

reduced to submission by William, 78 
Morrison, Robert, a botanist, 599 
Mortimer, Roger, his career, 208 
Mortimer, House of, its claims in the Lancas- 
trian times, 261, 265 
ivloscow, retreat of, 804 
Mounrjoy, his rule in Ireland, 444 
Mountmorris, his treatment by Wentworth, 501 
Mowbray, Roger, rewarded by William the 

First with grants of lands, 8x 
Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, captured 

by Rufus, 86 
Murray, Earl of, leads the Lords of the Con- 
gregation, 378 

made Regent, 380 
Mutiny Act ; see Statutes 

Napoleon ; see Buonaparte 

Nelson, Admiral; see Battles, Villeneuve 



N ewcastle, Duke of, his ignorance of the in- 
trigues of Austria and Russia, 726 
his incapacity, 727 
his corruption, 727, 728 
his quarrel with Pitt, 742 , 

Newton, Sir Isaac, his work, 599 ' 

Newton, the Evangelical, 721 
Nimeguen, treaty of, 635 
Nonconformists, effect on of the St. Bartholo. 
mew'.s Day of 1662, 609—611 ; see Prei 
byterians, Methodists, Quakers \ 

Norfolk, Earl of, rebels against William thk. 
First, 84 ; see also Bigod, Earl 1 

Norfolk, Duke of, his share in Henry the Eighth's 
divorce, 326 
arrests Thomas Cromwell, 348 , 

his expectations from the Emperor, 349 
Norfolk, Duke of, his treason against Eli2abeth, 

383,384 
Norfolk, Duke of, his answer to James the 

Second, 655 
Normandy described, 67 
civilization of, 68 
condition of, under William, 73 
conquest of, by Henry the Fifth, 262, afc 
Normans, settlement of, in France, 67 
conquests of, 70, 71 
blending of, witii England ; see English 
North, Lord, his protest against cruelties 

James the Second, 649 
North, Lord, in George the Third's time, 1 s 
servility to the king, 749 
stirred up by Clive to inquire into Indi 

his resignation, 761 
its effect, 762 

his coalition with Fox, 704 ; see 
America, Bosten, Massachusetts 
Northallerton ; see Battles 
Northampton, treaty of, 208 
Northampton, John of, 252 
Northumberland, Earl of, in Henry the Fourth': 
reign, his rising and that of his son, 
259 
in Henry the Eighth's reign, rebels, 338 
Northumberland, Duke of, his career, 352- 

354 
Northumberland, Earl of, rebels against Eliza 
beth, 382 
effect of her treatment of him, 384 ' 

Northumbria, establishment of a kingdom 
there, 15, 16 
history of it till its conversion, 16 — 20 
its fall, 34 

its anarchy after its fall, 38, 39 ; see al^x) 
yEthelfrith, yEthelbert, Eadwine, Cuth- 
bert, Oswald, Oswi, Whitby, Bseda, 
Csedmon 
Norwich, separate French colony In, 89 
Nothelm, his assistance to Bseda, 38 
Nottingham, Lord, his opposition to Mar' 

borough, 695 
Nottingham, peace of, 43, 44 
Noweli, Dean, Ehzabeth's treatment of him, 

371 . , 
Noy, his revival of ship-money, 502 

Gates, Titus, his plot, 636 — 638 

his pension, 675 
O'Brien, Smith, his insurrection, 817 



als. 



INDEX, 



839 



iccleve as a poet, 2S8 

am, William of, his rank as a schoolman. 



Jckh; 

/ his effect on Wyclif, 229 ^ ■, i- 

3'Connell, Daniel, his agitation for Catholic 

Emancipation, 814 
\ effect of his violence, ib. 

i his *' Repeal " agitation, 815 

I his arrest, 816 -r^ , i, 

pda, Archbishop, makes peace with Danelagh, 

Odo of Bayeux left in charge of England, 77 
I his tyranny, 78 
I rewarded by a grant of manors, 81 

rebels against William, 84 
' his arrest, ib. 
\\ rebels against Rufus, 85 
.^Oiifa, king of Mercia, his rule, 39, 40 

his relations with Charles the Great, 40, 41 

Oglethorpe, General, founds Georgia, 738 

Oldcastle, Sir John, 260 

O'Neills, the, 442, 443 

Orangemen, their cruelties in Ireland, 790 

791 
,Ordericus Vitalis, as an authority, 67, 70, 78 

Orleans, Duke of, his intrigues in France, 260 

Orleans, siege of; see Joan of Arc 
' Ormond invites Charles the First to Ireland, 

• I made Duke and Steward by Charles the 
Second, 605 
'\ Orosius, translation of, by ^Ifred, 48 
Oswald, king of Northumbria, 21 

calls missionaries unto Northumbria, 22 
I effect of his victories, 28 

{ Oswi, king of Northumbria, 24 
effect of his victories, 28 
presides at the Synod of Whitby, 28, 29 
Otho, the Emperor, his alliance with John at 

Bouvines, 121 
Otho, the Papal legate, 141, 142 
Oxford, medical school of Jews at, 83 

Matilda's escape from, 98 
Oxford, University of, i:s early history, 127 
lectures of Vacarius at, 128 
I description of its early appearance, 128 — 

I 131 

f Normans and Gascons come to, after divi- 

sions at Paris, 132 
Chancellor of, his position' in the thirteenth 

century, 132 
takes place of University of Paris, 229 
Provisions of, 149 — 151 
the centre of LoUardry, 235 
degeneracy of learning at, in the fifteenth 

century, 288 
its zeal for Charles the First, 531 
Oxford, Earl of, Henry the Seventh's treatment 
of him, 296 
i Oxford, Earl of, Burleigh's son-in-law, turns 
Roman Catholic, 401 



Padua, importance of its University in the 
thirteenth century, 131 
; Paine, Thomas, Pitt's opinion of him, 784, 785 
• Palmerston, Lord, his career, 815, 816, 817, 
8r8 
Paris, University of, its importance in the 
thirteenth century, 128, 129, 131 



Paris, University of — continued* 
dissensions in, 132 

its reputation transferred to Oxford, 229 
treatment of, in Cranmer's canvass, 328 
Paris, treaty of, 762 
Paris, city of, rules France in 1792, 781 
Parish, origin of, 3c 

Parker, Matthew, made Archbishop of Can- 
terbury, 370 
his object, 371 
his effect on the clergy, 378 
his enforcement of uniformity, 457, 458 
Parker, the Roman Catholic president of Mag- 
dalene College, 654 
Parliaments, rise of, 164, 167 — 171 

position of, in time of Edward the Third, 

224 — 228 
attacks of, on the Pope, 229 
decline of, under Lancastrians ; see Com- 
mons, House of 
claims of, to regulate succession after fall 

of Henry the Sixth, 278 
importance of, under Edward the Fourth, 

283 
their relations with the Tudors, 393 — 397 
their feeling about Protestantism, 354, 

405 
their struggle against James the First, 

469—472, 476—478 
their struggle against Charles the First ; see 
Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Wentworth, &c. 
** the Drunken Parliament " in Edinburgh, 

619 
reports of debates in them, 751, 752 
of Ireland ; ^ee Ireland 
Acts of; see Statutes 
Parsons, the Jesuit, 401, 402 
Paston, letters of, 288 
Paterson suggests schemes of a national bank, 

. 6S3. 
Patrick, his mission to Ireland, 21 
" Patriots," the, oppose Walpole, 712 
Paulinus goes to Northumbria, 18 
his conversion of Eadwine, 20 
his flight from Northumbria, 21 
conquers land of West Saxons, 31 
Peasantry, revolt of; see Tyler, Wat 
condition of, in early times, 237, 238 
first alterations in their condicion, 230. 240 
their struggle to attain a higher condition, 

241 _ 

effect on them of Statutes of Labourers, 242 

John Ball preaches to them ; see Ball, John 

subsequent struggles of, after Tyler^s time, 

250, 251 _ 

Peckham, Archbishop, his reputation as a 

scholar, 147 
Peel, Sir Robert, supports the Wellington 
iVlinistiy, 814 
becomes Prime Minister, 8 15 
his policy about free trade, 016 
Pelhams, the, contrasted with Walpole, 712 
Pelham, Henr^^, his rise, 722 
his fall, 727 
gives Pitt office, 729 
Pencriche, Pichard, a teacher in reign of 

Edward the Third, 212 
Penda, his struggle against Northumbria, 2c, 

21, 23, 24 
Penn, William, colonizes Pennsylvania, 758 



840 



INDEX, 



Pepys, his account of the change of feeling to- 
wards Cromwell in England, 6x6 
his opinion of Charles the Second, ib. 
of the Triple Alliance, 624 
of Shaftesbury, 629 
Perceval, Spencer, becomes Prime Minister, 
•801 
his resistance to America, 803 
his death, 804 
Perrers, Alice, her influence at court of Edward 

the Third, 227, 228 
Perth, convention of, 204 

Peterborough, abbey of, founded by Wulfere, 
31 
burnt by Danes, 44 
Peters, Hugh, his justification of Pride's Purge, 

■r> . . 554 

Petition, Millenary, 464 

of Right, 486, 487 
Petitioners and abhorrers, 643 
Petre, Father, called to Privy Council, 655 
Petty, Sir William, an economist, 598 
Pevensey, William lands at, 75 
Philip Augustus, hie relations with John, 109 

his effect on Arthur's cause, in 
Philip the Second of Spain, his marriage J see 
Mary 

perceives hopelessness of persecution in 
England, 860 

puzzled at Elizabeth's power, 363 

Elizabeth's use of, 368 

his character as a statesman, 403 
Philips, Sir Robert, his speeches against Charles 

the First, 481 
Picts, the, 6 

their league with the Britons, 7 

their defeat by the English, 8 
Piers the Ploughman, vision of, 231 ; see also 

Longland 
Pilgrimage of grace, 338 
Pillnitz, conference of, 780 
Pitt, William, the elder leads the " Bo^'-s," 714 

his career in office, 727 — 732 

effects of it, 737 

effects of his assistance to Frederick, 740 

George the Second's dislike of him, 741 

his fall, 742 

his refusal to return to office, 747 

approves the resistance of America, 748 ; 
see also Chatham, Earl of 
Pitt, William the younger, his first appearance 
in Parliament, 763 

moves for Parliamentary reform, 763, 764 

his struggle against the coalition, 765 

his India Bill, 765 

his treatment of Warren Hastings, 766, 
767 

compared with Walpole, 767 

his answer to Fox about his policy towards 
France, 767 

his financial policy, 768 — 770, 771 

failure of his Bill for Parliamentary Re- 
form, 770 

his attitude about the slave trade, 772 

about the regency, 774 

about the French Revolution and about 
Prussia, 774, 775 

his hopes from France, 777 

his opposition to Burke, 778, 779 

suppoJirts Fox's Libel Bill, 779 



Pitt — co7ttinued. 

defeats plots of the French emigrants, 781 
struggles for peace, 782 
his change of policy, 782 
attempts to make peace with France. 78 = 
^786 _ \ 

his relations with Ireland, 788 — 793 
with the peerage, 791, 792 J 

with the Roman Catholics, 793, 794 I 

his resignation, 794 
his death, 797, 798 
Plagues in Charles the Second's time, 615 ; set 1 

also Black Death 
Plantagenet, origin of the name, 97 
Poggio, his view of English literature, 288 
Poland, relation of, to Protestantism, 462 

divisions of, 774, 775, 783 
Pole, Michael de la, Earl of Suffolk, 254 
Pole Reginald, his view of Henry the Eighth's 
character, 301 
his advice to Wolsey, 328 
made Cardinal, 339 
Pollock, General, his Afghan expedition, 816 . 
Poor ; see Statutes, Peasantry ] * 

Poor Law Reform, 815 
Pope, claims of, on England, 82 

attacks of Ockham and Wyclif on, 229 — 231 
Porter, John, in Bonner's time, 447 
Portsmouth, Duchess of, supports the exclu- 
sion Bill, 644 
her presence at Charles the Second's! 
death-bed, 649 ^ 

Portreeve, his position in time of Henry the\ 

First, 89 
Portugal, relations of, with Spain and Eng- 
land, 623 j 
treatment of, at treaty of Fontainebleau, 
799 . , 
Wellesley's opinion of, 800 I 
Wellesley's campaign in, 800, 801 
Prsemunire, Statute of ; see Statutes 
Pragmatic Sanction, 709 

Prague, University of, Wyclif 's writings'" 
brought to it : see Wyclif ^ 

Presbyterianism, attitude of leaders of Long 

Parliament to it, 454, 455 

treatment of, in Scotland by Laud, 507 — 

growth of, 526 
Presbyterians, their struggle against the Inde- 
pendents, 545—551 ^^ 
their relations with Usher, 608 
effect of their expulsion from Church of 

England, 610 
their attitude at time of Scotch Act of^i^^ 
Union, 697 ^V . 

Press, liberty of, attacked by Grenville, 746 j^ 

growth of its power, 751, 752 i 

Pretender, the old, 706 | 

Pretender, the young, 724, 725 
Pride, Colonel, his purge, 553, 554 Lj.i 

Prior, Matthew, his satires on the Allies, 699 1 
Protestants ; see Lollardry, Latimer, Cromwell 

(Thomas), Cranmer V\vi^.^ 

Elizabeth's attitude towards, 364, 366, 367, 

369 
growth of their position in Elizabeth's 

reign, 398, 399 ^ 

growth of their clerg)% 398 \ 

Pro visors ; see Statutes 



INDEX, 



841 



Protestantism, history of, during Elizabeth's 

reign, 462 
Prussia, relations of, with England, 774, 775 
rises against Napoleon, 837 ; see also 

Frederick the Second 
Prynne, his ** Histrio-mastrix," 512 

his trial and punishment, 514 
Pulteney leads opposition to Walpole, 712 

becomes Earl of Bath, 722 
Puritans, their first settlement in America, 490 
their ideal, 588, 589 
their wish for uniformity of belief, 610 
their influence on the United States, 739 
Puritanism, its effect on England, 393 
its growth in Elizabethan times, 427 
hatred of its professors for the stage, 429 
its effect on the people, 449—454 
distinct from Presbyterianism, 454, 455 ; 

see also Laud 
fall of, 580—586 
causes of its fall, 590, 591 
its effect on the history of England, 772 
Pym, his feelings towards Episcopacy, 454 
his first election, 471 
his speech about the Petition of Right, 

487 
his character and position, 519, 520 
brings in the Grand Remonstrance, 525, 

526 
his views on Church Reform, 526 
attempted arrest of, 527 
his attitude after Charles the First's attempt 

to arrest five members, 529 
determines to ally the Long Parliament 

with Scotland, 533 
his last plans, 534 — 536 
effect of his death on Cromwell's position, 

536 
his body taken from the grave, 608 
his influence on Finance, 711 



Quadruple Alliance, the, 708 
Quakers, the, protected by Cromwell, 575 
their assertion of freedom of belief, 610 
special persecution of them, 612 
Quo warranto, writs of, 197 

Radbod, King of Frisia, 37 

Raedwald, King of East Anglia, 17 
his inconsistency in religion, 19 
his opposition to Christianity, 20 

Rahere builds St. Bartholomew's priory, 92 

Raikes, his Sunday Schools, 721 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, *' History of the World," 

his account of Spenser, 414 
failure of his last expedition, 475 
his discovery of Virginia, tobacco, and pota- 
toes, 491 
Ray, John, his scientific works, 599 
Reform of Parliament ; see Commons, House 

of 
Reformation, its effect in separating off the 

English Church from others, 610 
Remonstrance, the Short, 487, 489, 490 

the Grand, 525, 526 
Repyngdon, his sermons, 235 
Reresby, his opinion of Charles the Second, 
64.1 



Reynolds, Sir Joshua, his friendship for Burke 

775 
Rich, Edmund, story of, 130, 131 

his support of the Earl Mareschal, 141 
Richborough, fortress of, 8 
Richard the First of England, his character, 
109 
his polic3% 109, no 
his treatment of Scotland, 181 
Richard the Second, effect of his accession, 

243 
his attitude in Tyler's insurrection, 254 
after it, 247 

takes power into his own hands, 254, 255 
effects of his policy, 255, 556 
his fall, 256, 257 
his treatment of Ireland, 434 
Richard the Third, his seizure of the throne, 

293 . 

his policy, 293, 294 

his death, 295 
Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy, 68 
Richardson, Chief Justice, Laud's quarrel 

with, 496 
Richelieu, effects of his policy, 657, 658 _ 
Richmond, Duke of, his advocacy of Universal 

Suffrage, 770 
Ridley, his execution, 359 
Rivers, Lord, his hterary ability, 292 
Rizzio, his career, 378 
Robert Guiscard, 70 
Robert, Duke of Normandy, 71 

his pilgrimage, 71 
Robert, son of William.the First, rebels against 
his father, 85 

Normandy bequeathed to, 85 

continual rebellion in his name against 
Rufus, 85 

sells Normandy to Rufus, 87 

goes to Crusades, ^j 

bis return, 87 

heads a rebellion against Henry the First, 
92 
Robert of Belesme rebels against Henry the 

First, 92 
Robespierre, Maximilian, opposes war, 780 

his fall, 784 
Robinson, John, the Separatist, 459 

his voyage, 492 
Rochelle, fall of, 487, 488 ^ 
Rochester, siege of, by William Rufus, 86 
Rochester, Lord, his profligate poems, 589 
Rochester, Bishopric of, what it represented, 

Rockingham, Lord, inclines to Pitt, 745 

his ministry, 747 

his dislike of Parliamentary Reform, 751 

makes peace, 763 

his death, 764 

effect of his reforms, 765 
Rodney, Admiral, effect of his victor}'-, 761 
Roger de Toesny, a Norman leader, 70, 72 
Roger of Hoveden as a chronicler, 114 
Roger, Guiscard's brother, 70 
Rogers, execution of, 358 
Rohese, mother of Becket, 100 
Rolf the Ganger, his conquests in France 67 
Rome, relations of, with I3ritain, 5, 6 

influence of, in Church, 28 — 33 
Romney secured by William the Conqueror, 78 



842 



INDEX. 



Romsey, Matilda educated in nunnery at, 87 
Kookwood, Elizabeth, treatment of, 400 
Rossbach, battle of ; see Battles 
Rousseau expresses moral conceptions of his 

time, 773 
Ro^'^al Society founded, 598 
Rudyard, Sir Benjamin, his hopes from Charles 

the First, 480 
" Rump," the ; see Commonwealth, Cromwell, 

Vane, Martin 
Rupert, Prince, his exploits in the civil wars, 
, .531, 533, 535 

his flight after Marston Moor, 535 
his conduct at Naseby, 541 
Russell, family of,_rise of, from the spoil of 

the monasteries, 342 
Russell, Lord, helps to head the country party, 

627 
Russell, William, Lord, his support of Shaftes- 
bury in the Exclusion Bill, 641 
his trial and execution, 646 
Russell, Admiral, his intrigues with James the 
Second, 679 
his defeat of the French at La Hogue, 679, 

680 
made Secretarj^ of the Admiralty, 683 
Russell, Lord John, his first ministry, 816, 817 
his second ministry, 818 
his desire for reform of Parliament, 819 
Russia, rise of, under Catherine the Second, 
774 
England's war with, 817 
Rygge, Chancellor of Oxford, 235 
Ryswick, Peace of, 684 

Sacheverell, Dr., 700 

Sackville, his '* Gorboduc," 418, 419 

Salisbury, John of, his holiness of life, 92 

his fame at Paris, 129 
Salisbury, Roger of, his arrest by Stephens, 98 
Salisbury, Earl of, a leader of Lollards, 256 

his death, 259 
Salisbury, Countess of, her death, 325 
Saint ; see St. 

Sancroft, Archbishop, protests against Decla- 
ration of Indulgence, 656 
San Domingo, taking of, 576 
Sarsfield, General, in Ireland, 677 
Sautre, William, his execution, 258, 259 
Savile, Sir John, his rivalry with Wentworth, 

504 
Saville, Sir Henry, his dying speech, 478 
Savoy, Duke of, treatment of, by Cromwell, 

575 
Saye and Sele, Lord, a leader of the Presby- 
terians, 526 
made Lord Privy Seal, 605 
Sawtre ; see Sautre 
Saxons, their settlement in England, 2 
Saxons, East and West, their colonies, 14 ; see 

also East Saxons, Essex, Wessex 
Saxons, South, their kingdoms, 10 
Schomberg, General, in Ireland, 677 
Scinde, annexation of, 816 
Scots, King of, invested with fief of Cumoer- 

land, 52 
Scots, the, absorbed by English, 53 
Scotland, its treatment by William the First, 85 
struggles of, against England up to time 
of Wallace, 178—187 



Scotland — continued, 

its state at accession of Elizabeth, 372—- 

. 374 

Its treatment by Laud, 507 — 510 

effect on it of Charles the Second's policy, 
619 

its treatment by James the Second, 652, 
653 

union of, with England, 696, 697 
Scrope, Archbishop of York, his insurrection 

and death, 259 
Sedley, Sir Charles, 589 
Separatists, the, 458 — 460 
September, Massacres of, 781, 782 
Serf; see Peasantry 
Seringapatam, capture of, 786 
Shaftesbury, Lord, his taunts against the 
queen, 619 

his discovery of Charles's perfidy, 628 

his policy at court, 628 — 630 

causes of his being driven from office, 630, 

his subsequent policy, 631, 632 

his first sketch of the Exclusion Bill, 632 

sent to the Tower by Dandy, 634 

takes up the Popish Plot, 636 — 638 

is made Lord Treasurer after Danby's fall 
.638 

his championship of Monmouth, 641 

his second dismissal from office, 641 

his later policy, 641 — 645 

his Bill of Divorce, 643 

his flight and death, 646 
Shakspere, highest type of Elizabethan litera- 
ture, 399, 413 

scantiness of information about him, a2i,^ 
422 

his "Venus and Adonis,*' 423 

his dramas, 423 — 428 

his sympathy with the insurrection 0/ 
Essex, 426 

George the Third's opinion of him, 741 
Shane O'Neill, 442, 443 
Shaxton, made Bishop of Salisbury, 345 

his imprisonment, 347 
Shelburne, Lord, leads the Chatham party, 763 

his ministry, 764 
Sheldon, Archbishop, encourages buflfoonery, 

589 
Sherburne, Ealhstan, Bishop of, 43 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, his view of Napo- 
leon's invasion of Spain, 800 
Sheriffs, office of, 169 
Shippen, his opinion of VValpole, 702 
Ship-money, 502, 503 
Shire, Knights of, institution of, 169 — 171 

their union with the burgesses, 225 
Shrewsbur3'-, foundation of, 39 

the Norman castle at, 78 
Shrewsbury, Earl of, intrigues with James the, 
Second, 679 

becomes Secretary of State, 683 
Sidney, Sir Philip, his character, 392, 393 

his relations with Spenser, 414 
Sidney, Sir Henry, his government of Ireland, 

442 
Sidney, Algernon, his inclination to the Inde- 
pendents, 546 

his trial and death, 646 
Sikhs, risings of, 816, 817 



INDEX. 



843 



Simeon of Durha.m, as an authority, 78, 113 
Skekon, his poetry, 390 
Slavery in Early England, 13 
efforts of Church against, 54 
trade in, abohshed at Bristol, 55 
prohibited by William, 185 
abolished by Act of Parhament, 815 ; see 
Wilberforce, Statutes 
Sleswick, its relations with Early England, i 
Smith, John, discovers Bay of Chesapeake, 491 
Smith, Adam, his " Wealth of Nations," 769 
Smith, Sir Sidney, defeats Buonaparte at 

Acre, 787 
Snowdon, Lords of, 159 
Socinianism, its growth in Poland, 462 
Socinians excluded from the Parliament of 

1657, 579 
Sophia, Electress of Hanover, declared suc- 
cessor to the throne, 688 
Somers, Lord, chosen President of a Royal 
Society, 598 
a member of the Whig Junto, 682 
becomes Lord Keeper, 683 
effects the union between England and 

Scotland, 697 
becomes President of the Council, 698 
Somersetshire, insurrection in, against the 

Normans, 78 
Somerset, Duke of, in Henry the Sixth's reign, 

276 
Somerset the Protector, his accession to power, 
.350 
his fall, 351 
Somerset, Eari of, his answer to James the 

Second, 655 
Somerville tries to murder Elizabeth, 408 
Soult, Marshal, 801, 802, 807 
Southampton, Earl of, his ; elations with Shak- 
spere, 425 
with the Earl of Essex, 426 
Southampton, Earl of, in James the Second's 

time, becomes Lord Treasurer, 605 
South Saxons ; see Saxons, South 
South-Sea Bubble, 708 
Southumbrians, the, 15 
Southwark burnt by William the First, 77 
Spain, its position in Europe in Elizabeth's 
reign, 403—405 _ 
relations between it and England after the 

Armada, 430, 431 
James the First's policy towards, 474, 475 
war between it and England in George the 

Second's time, 713 
its treatment by Buonaparte, 799, 800 
invasion of, by Wellesley, 800, 801 ; see 
also Philip the Second 
Speed, his chronicles, 391 
Spenser, Elizabeth's favour to, 362, 366 
his work and life, 413 — 417 
his use of the Bible, 448 
his influence on Milton, 511 
Stafford, Lord, his execution, 644 
Stair, Master of; see Glencoe, Massacre of 
St. Albans, chronicle of, 288 
Stamp Act, the, 746—748 
Stanhope, Lord, First Lord of the Treasury, 

cause of his death, 708 
Star-Chamber for Jews in William the First's 
time, 83 
Charles the First's use of, 501, 502 



Statutes, Petition of Commons, how converted 
into them, 226 

of Appeals, 329, 330 

Bill of Rights, 672 

Board of Control, Indian : see Pitt 

Boston Port Act ; sec Boston 

Conventicle Act, 6ii, 612 

Five Mile Act, 611, 612 

Habeas Corpus Act, 647, 648 

Heresies, 258, 259, 352 — 369 

Kilkenny, 434 

Labourers, 242, 243 ; see also Peasantry 

Libel Act, Fox's ; see Fox. Charles- 
James 

Merchants, 166 

Monopolies, abolition of, 397 

Mortmain, 166 

Municipalities, Reform of, 815 

Mutiny Act, 673, 674 

Poor Laws, 384 — 386, 815 

Praemunire, 229 

Proclamations, Royal, 350 

Provisors, 229 

Quia Emptores, 166 

Reform Act, 814 

Regulation Act, Indian, 758 

Schism Act, 703 

Septennial Act, 707 

Six Articles Act, 349, 350 

Slave trade, abolition of, 798 

Slavery, abolition of, 815 

Stamp Act, 746 

Test Act, 401, 609, 627, 674 

Toleration Act, 674 

Treasons Act, 785 

Triennial Act, 674 

of Uniformity in Edward the Sixth's 
reign, 350 
in Elizabeth's reign, 371 
in Charles the Second's reign. 609 

of Winchester, 166 
St. Bartholomew, Massacre of, 404 

in 1662 ; see Bartholomew, St. 
Stephen, King, his birth and education, 97 

silences Vacarius, 128 
Stewart, Dugald, his estimate of Bacon, 595 
St. Frideswide, the priory of, at Oxford, 128 
St. Gall, monastery of, 21, 22 
St. George, Church of the canons of, at 

Oxford, 129 
Stigand, Archbishop, 66 

his deposition, 82 
Stillingfleet, his schemes of Protestant compre- 
hension, 623 
his pamphlets against superstition, 653 
Stirling, battle of; see Battles 
St. John the lawyer, his comment on affairs in 

1642, 517 
despatched to Holland by the Common- 
wealth, 560 
St. John, Henrjr ; see Bolingbroke, Lord 
Stokes, Peter, his attacks on the Lollards, 235 
Stowe, his chronicles, 391 
St. Paul's, churchyard of, when built, 92 
St. Paul's, meet':igat, of Barons, 122 

Dean of, die;, of fright, 199 
Strafford ; see Wentworth 
Straw, Jack, his position in Tyler's insurreo. 

tion, 244 
Strickland, Elizabeth's order to, 396 



844 



INDEX, 



Strode, his view of the relations between Long 
Parliament and the Scotch, 521 
his attempted arrest, 527 
Strong-bow ; see Ireland, conquest of 
St. Ruth, General, 677 
Stuart, early line of, 372, 373 ; see also Mary, 

James the First, etc. 
Suchet, Marshal, 802 

Sudbury, Simon de, his murder approved by 
Hereford, 233 
advises the king to resist the insurgents, 

.245 
his death, ib. 
Suffolk, Earl of, in Henry the Sixth's reign, 

274 ; see also Pole, Michael de la 
Sunderland, Lord, truckles to Duke of York, 
645 
threatens to swamp House of Lords, 655 
his policy, 684 
invents a " Cabinet," 682 
sent to Vienna, 695 
dismissed, 700 
Surajah Dowlah, 734 

Sussex, Earl of, his opinion of prevalent state 
of religion in north, 382 
his treatment of Shane O'Neill, 443 
Swegen, Danish leader, invades England, 57 

conquers England, 58 
Swegen, King of Denmark, his invasion of 

England, 78 
Swegen, son of Godwine, Earl of Mercia, 65 
Swend, his project and death, 60 
Swift, Jonathan, his pamphlet against the 

Allies, 699 
Swithun, bishop of Winchester, 43 

Tacitus, his account -of the Germans, 3 

Taillefer the minstrel, 76 

Talavera ; see Battles 

Tallard, his assistance to the Allies, 693, 694 

Talleyrand, his desire for war between France 

and Prussia, 809 
Tamar becomes the English frontier, 41 
Taunton, origin of, 34, 35 
Taylor, Rowland, his execution, 357, 358 ^ 
Taylor, Jeremy, his " Liberty of Prophecying," 

601 
Tenchebray, battle of, 93 

Temple, Sir William, makes the Triple Alli- 
ance, 625, 626 
wishes to strengthen the Royal Council, 

639 
his difference from Shaftesbury about 

Monmouth, 641 
his advice to Charles on the occasion, ib. 
supports the Exclusion Bill, 643 
Temple, Lord, his refusal of office, 747, 748 
Test Act ; see Statutes 
Thanet assigned to England, 7, 8 
Thegn, origin of, 55 
Thelwall, trial of, 785 

Theobald of Canterbury, his holiness of life, 
92 
a moral leader, 99 
Theodore of Tarsus dispatched to England, 29 
his organisation of the Church, 29, 30 
negotiates a peace, 34 
Thistlewood ; see Cato Street Conspiracy 
Thurstan, Archbishop of York, resists the 
Scots, 99 



Tillotson, Archbishop, his scheme of Protes- 
tant comprehension, 623 
writes pamphlets against superstition, 653 
Tilsit, Peace of, 799 
Tippoo Sahib, his struggle with the English, 

-jU, 794 
Toleration Act, see Statutes 
Tooke, Home ; see Home Tooke 
"Tories," origin of the party, 643 

their change of policy on the accession of 

George the Third, 741 
their support of the younger Pitt, 767 
govern England after war with France, 
799 
Tortulf the Forester, 95 

Tostig, son of Godwine, driven to Flanders, 66 
invades England with Harold Hardrada, 75 
defeated at Stamford Bridge ; see Battles 
Tournaments introduced by Edward the 
First, 177 
occasions for vice under Edward the 
Third, 231 
Tourville, Admiral, 679, 680 
Towns, causes of their early wealth and impor- 
tance ,89 
their struggles for self-government, ib. 
Townshend, his fall, 714 
Tresham ; see Gunpowder Plot 
Triennial Act ; see Statutes 
Triers, Cromwell's Board of, 573 
Troyes, Treaty of, 263, 264 
Trumwine, Bishop of Whithem, 33 

his flight, 33 
Trussel, Sir William, his address to Edward 

the Second on his deposition, 204 
Tunstall, Cuthbert, studies at Padua, 304 
Turgot, his position as an annalist, 113 

motives and character of his policy, 768 
Turkey, alliance on behalf of, between Eng- 
land, Holland, and Prussia, 775 
saved from France by Convention of Cairo, 

795 
revolt of Greeks against, 813, 814 
Tyler, Wat, effect of his rising on Wyclif, 233 

details of his rising, 243 — 247 
Tyndale, his version of the Bible suppressed by 
Henry the Eighth, 327 : see also Cover- 
dale 
revives Lollardry, 342 
translates the Bible, 342, 343 
effect of his work, 343, 447 
Tyrconnell, Lord, his rule in Ireland, 663 

his struggle against William the Third, 671, 
672 

Ulster, colonisation of, its effects, 572 
Universities, rise of, 127 ; see also Oxford, 
Cambridge, Paris, Cranmer 

attitude of, towards William after the 
Peasants' Revolt, 251 
United S tates ; see America, United States of 
Uriconium, the burning of, 14 
Usher, Archbishop, insulted by Strafford, 5c o 

his scheme of Church government, 608 
Utrecht, peace of, 702, 703 

the support of it by the Whigs, 707 

its gain to England, 708 

Vacafius, his lectures at Oxford, 128 
Van Artevelde, effect of his death, 219 



INDEX. 



845 



Vane, Sir Henry, the elder, 569 
V.axie, Sir Harry, the younger, lands in New 
England, 499 

leads the Independents, 526 

helps to form the league with Scotland, 

533. 571 . , ^ , 

his opposition to the Presbyterians, 546 
his reoiganization of the na\^, 558 
urges on the Reform Bill, 561, 563 
Cromwell's taunt to, 564 
offered a seat in the Council of State, 565 
opposes Richard Cromwell, 581 
defeat of his efforts in Richard Cromwell's 

Parliament, 581 
exempted from the indemnity, 607 
his trial and execution, 608 

Vere, Sir Horace, leader of volunteers, 476 

Verney, Sir Edmund, his feelings to Charles 
the First, 525 

Vernon, Admiral, 714, 715 

Vervins, treaty of, between France and Spain, 

Vespucci, Amerigo, his travels, 297 

Victoria, Queen, accession of, 816 

Villars, his battles, 693 — 698 

Villeinage dies out after Tyler's rising, 250, 

251 ; see also Peasantry 
Villeneuve, Admiral, his struggle with Nelson, 

. . 797 
Virgil, study of his works revived in the 

thirteenth century, 128 
Virginia, discovery of, 49T, 492 
its aristocratic character, 738 
Washington's influence in, 753 
Voltaire, character and efifect of his work, 773 

Wane, poem of, 70 

V/alcheren, expedition to, 801 

Wales, reduction of, by William the First, 85 

share of, in the Barons' War, 154 

literature of ; see Literature 

its relations to England, 158 — 160 

conquest of, by Edward the First, 163 ; see 
Welsh _ 
Wallace, William, his career, 185 — 187 
Valler, Sir William, defeated by the Cornish- 
men, 592 
vVallingford, treaty of, 100 
Wallington, John, his brother, 451 
Wallis, Dr., 598 
Walpole, Sir Robert, his rise, 701, 702 

his foreign policy, 703 

his dislike of reform, 705 

warns the House against the South Sea . 
Bubble, 708 

his foreign policy, 708—709 

his Finance, 710^ 711 

his fall, 714, 715 

policy in House of Xords, 722 

his rejection of a plan of taxing America, 
•39 

suspends Convocation, 716 

his drunkenness, 717 

compared with Pitt, 767, 771 
Walpole, Horace, his admiration for Whitfield, 

^.718 

ms account of Pitt's management of corrup- 
tion, 728 

his account of Pitt's popularity, 729 

his account of the victories in Canada, 737 



Walsingham, of St. Alban's, history of, 288 
Walsmgham, in Elizabeth's reign, his opinion 

of Elizabeth, 366 
Walter de Map, his romances, 115, 116 

his satires, ib. 
Walworth, William, kills Tyler, 246 
Ward, Dr., a mathematician, 598 
Wareham, Danes appear before, 46 
Warham, Archbishop, his life, 300 
kindness to Erasmus, 301 
his attitude towards New Learning, 304 — 

306 
his sympathy with Erasmus's studies, 307 
his view of Wolsey's taxes, 319 
submits Henry's claim to Convocation, 329 
dies, 330 

his view of the monks, 333 
Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, as Regent of Scot- 
land, 184, 185 
his resistance to Edward the First, 197 
Warwick, Earl of, in Edward the Second's 
time, his relations with Gaveston, 201, 
202 
Warwick, Earl of (King-maker), wins Battle of 
_ St. Alban's, 278 
his position and career, 279 — 281 
Warwick, Dudley, Earl of; see Northumber- 
land, Duke of 
Warwick, Rich., Earl of, in Charles the First's 
time, buys Connecticut, 499 
named Admiral of the Fleet, 530 
Washington, George, his influence in Virginia, 
753 
deplores the attack on the tea-ship.s, 753 
his character and position, 754, 755 
Watt, his steam-engine, 769 

its effects, 805 
Webster contrasted with Ben Jonson, 428 
Wedmore, peace of, 45, 46 
Wellesley, Lord, his devotion to Pitt, 767 

becomes Foreign Secretary, 801 
Wellington, Duke of, his successes in Portugal 
and Spain, 800 — 804, 807 ; see Battles 
character of his army at Waterloo, 809, 

810 
refuses to serve under Canning, 813 
forms a Tory Ministry, 814 
accepts Catholic Emancipation, ib. 
Welsh, for early history see Britons 

join Mercians against Northumbria, 19 
oppressed by Normans, 78 
Wentworth, Peter, Elizabeth's treatment of, 

396, 397 
Wentworth, Thomas, his first election, 471 
made sheriff of a county, 482 
his declaration on the Petition of Right, 

486 
his defence of that Petition, 504 
his early career, ib. 
his devotion to the court, ib. 
his "Thorough," ib. 
his rule in Ireland, 505 — 507 
his suggestions as to methods of govern- 
ment in England, 513 
his opinion of Hampden, 515 
niade Earl of Strafford, 516 
his return from Ireland, 517 
his attitude in the Scotch War, 517, 518 
the hatred against him, 521, 522 
his trial and execution, 522, 533 



846 



INDEX. 



Wesley, Charles, his hymns, 719 
Wesley, John, his early career, 719, 720 

his differences from Whitfield, 720 

effect of their teaching in promoting the 
abolition of slave-trade, 772 
Wessex, first colonization of, 14 

its reconversion, 23 

submits to Northumbria, 30 _ 

rises again under Ini ; see Ini 

its power broken by the Danes, 42 

rises against them, 44 

reforms in ; see yElfred 
Westminster Confession, 544 
Westmoreland, Earl of, rises against Elizabeth, 

382 
Weston, a favourite of Buckingham, 488 

his administration as Treasurer, 500, 501 
Westphalia, Peace of, its effects, 657 
Wexford, massacre of, 558 

Wharton, Lord, presents a petition for peace 
with Scotland, 517 

a member of Whig Junto, 682 
Whewell, Dr., his opinion of Roger Bacon, 

Whigs, their origin, 643 

their aims at the Revolution, 675, 6-]^ 

their power, 682 

their war policy, 690 

their clause in the Act of Union with 

Scotland, 696, 699, 700 
their impeachment of Sacheverell, 700 
their triumph under Walpole, 704 
their submission to their leaders, 705 
their opposition to the younger Pitt's 

scheme of reform, 764 
defeated by Pitt, 767 
their opposition to Pitt's financial policy, 

their support of Fox at first in his approval 

of French Revolution, 777 
but subsequently leave him, 783 ; see also 

Fox 
join Tories against Buonaparte, 796 
their later reforms, 814, 815 
Whitby, its monastery founded by Hild, 26 
Synod of, 27 — 29 
the cowherd of ; see Coedmon 
Whitelock, his views of the arrest of the 

five members, 528 
Whitfield, his preaching, 718, 719 
Whitgift, his compulsion about the Articles, 

458 
Whithern, see of, 29 
N'^^'iclif ; sre Wyclif 
Vv'iglaf, King of Mercia, 41 
Wilberforce, William, sympathy of Methodists 
with him, 721 
his account of Pitt's feeling when defeated 

in Parliament, 770 
brings in his Bill against the Slave Trade, 

772 
his account of the cause of Pitt's death, 

V/ilfrlth of York, his life, 28 

hiscontest with CoL-nan ; see Colman 
Wilkes- John, denounced by the elder Pitt, 
729 
prosecuted, 746 

expelled from the House of Commons, and 
returned to it again, 750 



Wilkes — coil tintied. 

elected alderman of London, 750 

effect of his career, 751 

the abuses which made him advocate 
^ parliamentary reform, 770 
Wilkins, Dr., 598, 599 
William of Maimesbury, 33, 78 
William of Newborough, 114 
William of Jumieges, 67, 70 
William Longsword, Duke of Normandy, 68 
William of Poitiers, his ''Gesta Willelmi," 70 
William the Conqueror, his parentage and 
struggles with his subjects, 71 

his character, 71, 72 

his struggle with the Angevins, ib, 

his struggle with France, ib. 

his rule in Normandy, 73 

he makes Lanfranc his minister, 74 

his visit to England, ib. 

he wins battle of Senlac, 75, 76 ^ 

his conquest of England, 77 — 80 

lays waste the north, 79 

introduces feudalism, 80 

his struggle with the Baronage, 81 

his relations with the Church, 82 

his position as a landowner, S3 

character of his rule, 84, 85 

he abolishes capital punishment, 85 

his relations with Scotland and Wales, ib. 

his death, ib. 
William Rufus gains the crown, 85 

his rule, 86 

his military prowess, 87 

his death, ib. 
William, son of Henry the First, his death, 94 
William, son of Robert, heir of Henry the 

First, ib. 
William of Champeaux, his lectures, 129 
William, the Lion of Scotland, his relations 

with England, 181 
William Longbeard, 193, 194 
William of Wykeham, 227, 228 
William of Orange, the Silent, Elizabeth's 

relations with him, 368, 404, 405 
William of Orange, afterwards William the 
Third of England, leads the Dutch 
against Lewis the Fourteenth, 626 

Shaftesbury's intrigues with him, 632 

effect of his defeat, 634 

married to Mary, 634 

his education, 660, 661 

his policy, 661, 662 

his attitude towards James the Second, 
662, 663 

invited to England, 663, 664 

his landing, 665, 666 

becomes William the Third of England, 
667, 668 

his treatment of Scotland, 669, 670 

effect of his accession on theory of Divine 
^ Right, 673 

his complaint of his treatment by Parlia- 
ment, ib. 

his conquest of Ireland, 678 — 680 

changes introduced into the form of 
government by his accession ; see Sunder- 
land Cabinet 

his foreign policy, 685, 686 

betrayed by Lewis, 686 — 688 

his illness and death, 687 — 690 



INDEX. 



847 



William the Fourth, his accession, 814 

favours reform of Parliament, ib. 
Williams, Roger, expelled from Massachusetts, 

498 
Williams, Bishop, his scheme of Church Re- 
form, 526 

his protest, 527 
Willis, Dr. investigates the brain, 59Q 
Winchelsey, Archbishop, opposes Edward the 

First, 200 
Windebank, his flight from England, 521 
Winfrith ; see Boniface 
Winthrop, John, in New England, 493, 498 

his opinion of Long Parliament, 521 
Witenagemote, its origin, 30 

loses its popular character, 56 
Wither, George, his satires, 511 
Wolfe, General, 736, 737 
Wolsey, Thomas, his foreign policy, 305 

his rise into power, 316, 317 

his home policy, 317, 118 

his relations with Parliament, 318, 319 

his attitude about the king's divorce, 321, 
322 

his fall, 323, 324 

his use of the king's council, 501 
Woodward founds the science of mineralogy', 

599 
Worcester, Earl of, 292 
Worcester, battle of ; see Battles 
W>angholm, birthplace of Cuthbert, 24 
Wulfere, son of Penda, 24 

his rule, 30, 31 
Wulstan sent out to Esthonia by iElfrcd, 48 



Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester defeats rebels, 

S5 

Wycherley, his dramas, 589, 590 

Wyclif, his writings brought to Prague, 131 
his early life, obscurity of, 228 
his relation with Oxford and the school- 
men, 228, 229 
his attack on the Papacy, 229, 230 
his alliance with John of Gaunt, 231 — 233 
effect on his work of Tyler's rising, 233 
his attack on Transubstantiation, 234 
his writings generally, 234, 235 
his followers, 235, 236 
his death, 236, 237 

Wyndham, William, refuses to take 'office with- 
out Fox, 797 

Wynter, Admiral, his attack on Scotland, 374 



York, in the time of the Romans, 5 
capital of Roman Britain, 15 
centre of English politics for a time, 84 
York, Richard, Duke of, rebels against Henry 
the Sixth, 276, 277 
convenes Parliament, 278 
his death, ib. 
York, James, Duke of, suspected by the House 
of Commons, 627 
resigns his admiralship, 627 
returns in triumph after defeat of Exclusion 
Bill, 645 ; see also Exclusion Bill, 
Shaftesbury, Earl of, James the Second 
Young, Arthur, effect of his work on agricul- 
ture, 769 



THE END. 



London: r. clay, sons, and tavlcr, trinters, bread street hjll. 



X. 



y..y 



w 



W] 



Wl 
Wl: 



Wh 



Wil 



V/ilf 

1 

Wilk 



1 



LRBD':^ 



II 



